Minnesota state and county officials sue government over Renee Good, Alex Pretti investigations

Minnesota state and county authorities sued the federal government Tuesday, alleging they are being prevented from investigating the shootings of Renee Bonne, Alex Pretti and Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis by federal agents.

In the lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, Hennepin County Prosecutor Mary Moriarty and Bureau of Criminal Apprehension Superintendent Drew Evans alleged that the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security blocked state investigators from accessing evidence they needed to investigate the three shootings.

The lawsuit names the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security, Attorney General Pam Bondi and former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, who presided over Minnesota’s immigration crackdown earlier this year.

Spokespeople for DHS and the Justice Department could not immediately be reached for comment.

Both Good and Pretti were fatally shot by federal agents employed by DHS earlier this year as part of an immigration operation known as Operation Metro Surge. Sosa-Celis was shot and wounded by a federal agent during the same operation.

The lawsuit details how the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, or BCA, was blocked at every turn from accessing evidence in each of these three cases.

When the FBI began investigating Good’s shooting, the bureau initially agreed to share evidence and cooperate with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension in its parallel investigation into whether his killing was legally justified.

However, in an abrupt change from historical practice, the FBI reversed its policy the same day, preventing BCA investigators from attending interviews with key witnesses or accessing evidence collected at the scene.

The investigation was later abandoned and several federal prosecutors resigned in protest, after being pressured to stop investigating Good’s death as a civil rights case and being ordered to investigate Good’s wife and treat it as an assault case against a federal officer, CBS News previously reported.

To date, state and county officials have claimed in the lawsuit that Good’s car was in shrink wrap at an FBI warehouse in Brooklyn Center, Minn., and had “never been examined or processed.”

“BCA repeatedly requested that the FBI provide them with Ms. Good’s car or allow BCA to execute its search warrant on the car. FBI officials either refused or did not respond to these requests,” the lawsuit states, adding that the FBI recently informed the bureau that all evidence would only be turned over to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General.

After Good’s shooting, Venezuelan national Sosa-Celis was shot and wounded by a federal agent on January 14.

The lawsuit claims that initially, federal officials were willing to cooperate on this incident with state investigators — including even allowing BCA and FBI agents to be “paired into teams” so they could begin interviewing witnesses and examining the scene.

But that cooperation quickly stopped after the assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s Minnesota field office ordered it terminated, according to the lawsuit.

Although BCA collected as much information as it could, some of the key evidence remains in the hands of the federal government, the suit claims.

Initially, federal prosecutors filed charges against Sosa-Celis and accused him of attacking the federal agent who shot him, but those charges were dropped in February after prosecutors claimed they discovered “newly discovered evidence” that did not support the case.

Pretti, the former intensive care unit nurse, was the third person to be shot and killed by federal agents in a matter of weeks during Minnesota’s immigration crackdown.

Initially, the Justice Department did not open an investigation into Pretti’s death, allowing DHS to take the lead in investigating its own two federal agents, and BCA investigators were blocked from accessing the crime scene or interviewing the agents involved in Pretti’s death.

“To date, the federal government has not provided BCA or HCAO with the identities of the masked federal agents who shot Mr. Pretti,” the lawsuit states.

The Justice Department relented later that month in the face of growing pressure, and Assistant District Attorney Todd Blanche announced that the investigation would be conducted in part by the Civil Rights Division, whose criminal section specializes in investigating slander complaints against law enforcement officers.

Several days after the Justice Department announced it would open an investigation, state officials say the U.S. attorney’s office and the local FBI told them the government hoped to resume normal evidence-sharing practices in the Pretti case.

But then the Justice Department sent a lawyer from Washington, D.C., to coordinate the federal response to the state’s request, and soon the tone changed, according to the lawsuit.

“The U.S. Attorney indicated that evidence would be shared in only one direction: DOJ expected BCA to share its evidence with federal authorities, but federal authorities did not intend to share their evidence with the State,” the lawsuit claims.

The lawsuit does not name Washington’s attorney.

CBS News previously reported that the Civil Rights Division had dispatched Brandon Wrobelski — an attorney in its employment litigation section who has no experience in federal criminal cases — to work on the Pretti investigation.