A CNN correspondent covering the aftermath of Saturday’s fatal shooting of a demonstrator by federal immigration officers in Minneapolis can be heard coughing and struggling to breathe amid “extremely strong, peppery tear gas” deployed against protesters.
Sara Sidner, reporting live from the streets of Minneapolis, was describing the situation on the ground to CNN’s Fredricka Whitfield in the studio when she began choking after inhaling what she described as “military-grade CS gas.”
Whitfield told Sidner to get some water and returned for an update a few minutes later. But that’s when the situation intensified.
As the camera cut to the scene in Minneapolis, the image got completely blurred with smoke as Sidner could be heard coughing and gasping for air.
“I’m trying to breathe. Hold on,” she managed to say after a brief moment, before the camera cuts back to the studio.
Whitfield cut away from her again, adding, “This is what happens. You can’t speak. You can barely breathe. If you’re lucky, you can swallow some water, at least remove yourself from the situation.”
Sidner, co-anchor of “CNN News Central” and a senior national correspondent who led the network’s coverage after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020, later updated viewers in short videos shared on her Instagram account.
“We just got tear-gassed,” she said from a nearby donut shop, where she took cover. “None of us could breathe. My photographer, Jerry, and I were caught in the middle of a cloud of tear gas.”
Unrest in Minneapolis has only intensified in the weeks since 37-year-old Renee Good was fatally shot by an ICE agent on Jan. 7. Last week, a man from Venezuela was shot and wounded by an ICE officer attempting to conduct a traffic stop. That shooting came just one day after a woman was filmed getting dragged out of her car by federal agents as she was merely trying to get to a doctor’s appointment.
The man shot and killed on Saturday was identified by his parents as 37-year-old Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse at a VA hospital in the city.
