The Long Road To Tragedy

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Prologue

BAM BAM BAM — “OPEN UP!”

… I heard through my AirPods while returning from the garage to put out some trash. Looking through the front door’s peephole some four years ago I saw two armored Draper police officers and so cautiously complied.

“John?”, one of them asked, with an edge in their voice.

I cocked my head and donned an air of confusion.

“John So-And-So?”, they pressed.

“No… but I still get his mail!” I replied, elaborating that he appeared to be the previous tenant. They sighed in exasperation, relaxed visibly, and mentioned they were looking for him in relation to a traffic incident which I surmised to be a hit-and-run.

Thankfully everyone involved maintained a chill demeanor while following protocol and so a stale database entry didn’t escalate into irreversible carnage.

I have been reflecting on this experience with increasing frequency as the events of the last year have unfolded. Far too often the political narrative conflates the legitimacy of a mission with the mechanics of its execution while glossing over the infliction of collateral damage and the erosion of societal norms.

The Tip Of The Iceberg

The DHS announced Operation Metro Surge on 4 December 2025 and by 7 January 2026 ICE agents had killed US citizen Renee Good. Then, just as a deluge of international stories threatened to bury her tale, the story of Minnesotan mayhem and tragedy finally gained traction when CBP agents then killed US citizen and ICU nurse Alex Pretti on 24 January.

The timing of events is nothing short of remarkable. Alex’s killing came during the interstices of a funding bill having cleared the House but not yet the Senate, creating the mandate for Democrats to press for reforms. One may reasonably wonder how different the conversation would be today if Alex had, say, misset his alarm on one fateful Saturday or if CBP had gotten stuck in traffic.

These events remind me of the horrific midair collision between a military helicopter and a commercial airliner at the Reagan National airport almost exactly one year ago that killed all 67 people aboard the two aircraft. The day after the crash, Trump, foreshadowing the year to come, rushed to baseless conclusions about DEI, blaming Biden and Obama era policies before any meaningful investigation had occurred. Just a few days ago, on 27 January 2026, the NTSB, playing the role of grownups in the room, held a public meeting during which they released 74 findings and 50 recommendations that cited “systemic failures in airspace design, safety oversight, and risk management by the Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S. Army”, noting that “the FAA lacked effective strategies to identify, assess, and reduce recurring midair collision hazards in the skies around Reagan National”.

Sound familiar?

Ideally those charged with the safety, security, and efficacy of systems would proactively monitor and analyze leading indicators that hint of tragedy to come. Second best, then, is at least to have a framework, workforce, mandate, and will to diagnose the root cause of a tragedy once manifested, in the hopes of preventing not just similar ones but also understanding what other hazards lurk just below the surface.

No complex system can operate with such perfection as always to avoid disaster but good systems distinguish themselves in how they behave in the period after disasters at multiple time scales. Do they in the immediate aftermath rush to preserve evidence while withholding judgment or do they degrade chain-of-custody and rush to blame others? Do they conduct a thorough and transparent examination of the available evidence while staying open minded to explanation or do they target opponents and try to fit the evidence to the desired conclusions? Does society eventually get a thorough exposition on the findings and recommendations or do self-dealing power brokers get to bury inconvenient truths?

Law enforcement sits at a similar level of complexity and consequentiality as commercial aviation. We should all thus want investigations of the officer-involved shootings in Minnesota that prove as thorough and impartial as the NTSB’s investigation of the Reagan National tragedy. Yet with both shootings we saw cabinet level officials smearing the deceased as “domestic terrorists” within hours, the involved federal agencies positioning themselves to self-investigate while locking out state and local elements, and the DOJ maneuvering to tell a political story rather than pursuing the truth.

In aviation safety we speak of multiple layers that govern outcomes: threats, threat management, errors, error management, undesired states, undesired state management, and finally incidents and accidents. For a bad outcome to manifest, many layers of “swiss cheese” have to line up, and in the case of immigration enforcement and related protests even more layers need to line up than in aviation owing to their intensely sociopolitical origins. If we want to preserve and heal our democracy then we need to step back and consider the deep underpinnings of Renee’s and Alex’s deaths.

Myopic Armchair Quarterbacking

In March 2021, just a few months into my paragliding Odyssey, I found myself navigating an extremely consequential handful of seconds that would easily rank as the most terrifying moment of my life if only I had had the time to be scared and if paragliding hadn’t managed to deliver half a dozen similarly gnarly experiences in my first year in the sport — while ~100′ AGL I felt myself wobble, looked up to see a massive asymmetric deflation, fixated like a n00b on said deflation long enough to inadvertently initiate an auto-rotation, managed to counter that just in time not to crater but so late and vigorously as to initiate a spin and deep stall, caught the surge of my glider re-powering so late that I briefly saw the hill above it, and finally just barely managed to avoid slamming into a berm as I swung under my wing.

Fuck oh dear.

Just a few weeks later, while nursing a deep fear injury, my hands were way too heavy on the brake toggles in thermic conditions, imagining this to protect me from a deflation but in fact excessively slowing and deforming my glider, a configuration that this time led to the opposite problem of a full stall with minimal altitude, a situation that I somehow contrived to survive but the details of which largely elude me owing to the resultant concussion. That event sufficiently deepened the fear injury that I was basically continually miserable every time I “got back on the horse” and I didn’t properly enjoy flying again until a trip to Colombia some nine months later.

And so, by the time I had learned as much as I imagine I ever will about the events of this 7 January, I had some amount of sympathy for Jonathan Ross, the ICE officer who killed Renee Good, while still finding the whole situation abhorrent. By now much ink has been spilt analyzing the last second of the event by replaying it countless times in slow motion from multiple vantages. Renee was obviously turning away from the officer, so multiple commentators asserted, looking at the angle of the car’s wheels from behind and to the left. “Obvious to whom?”, I wanted to ask them. Could officer Ross in that moment have seen the wheels from his vantage in front of the car? Was he even looking toward the car at the key moment or was he perhaps distracted variously by his phone to record “evidence” for the “domestic terrorist database” as well as by the other officers shouting conflicting directives at Renee? Was he living out a fantasized redemption arc stemming from being dragged by a vehicle just seven months earlier, manufacturing risk carelessly, and then operating on fast-twitch reflexes with poor information and no margin for error as the situation went critical? Did Renee, overloaded by tactical chaos and strategic strain, make to avoid Ross but with too little margin for his System-1 thinking to be sure?

If the first round he put through the windshield weren’t egregious enough, surely the next two through the window were wholly damning, right? Yes and no… As a long-time indoor soccer goalie I have had countless very weird experiences with my brain — sometimes a hand or foot would shoot out and stop a shot seemingly with no involvement of my brain while in other moments it felt like time would dilate interminably while my brain worked out the puzzle. Paragliding has offered similarly divergent thought patterns — the aforementioned deflation-induced cascade couldn’t have lasted more than two or three seconds but felt like a subjective eternity while other incidents resolved (or didn’t) with pure muscle memory. I would guess that some combination of training, optionality, and restedness make all the difference in which modality I experience but not in a way I could reliably predict.

What would more reliably have made a difference in my formative paragliding moments would variously have been flying for a shorter time, flying with wider margins, or just choosing not to fly at all on that day. In a parallel universe the paragliding training ecosystem would be far more rigorous, structured, and continual, but it wasn’t and it isn’t. And if you’re a professional in a dangerous domain as opposed to a hobbyist then you’re under even more pressure to show up no matter what, your ability to choose training and missions is far more limited, weird social dynamics may continually funnel you into sketchy situations, and you won’t be able to just cut the day short because you don’t like how it’s going.

The last second of Renee’s life is arguably far less interesting than the last ten seconds for diagnostic purposes, except insofar as that last second was shaped by the preceding months and years of training, experience, policy, and prioritization. Most clearly, those last ten seconds seem to tell a story of officer-created jeopardy that kept collapsing the cone of possibilities until the margin for error had vanished and an officer, in harm’s way and perhaps suffering from PTSD, was firing (literally and metaphorically) on just his amygdala.

The final moments of Alex’s life, while even more horrifying, bear many similarities. One can imagine, bending over backwards to be generous, an officer mistaking a shout of “I have his gun!” for simply “gun!”, a seven person scrum causing wildly confusing sensory input, and a phone in hand getting mistaken for a weapon when viewed through glasses fogged by breathing heavily while wearing a mask, possibly after taking an elbow to the nose, possibly in a cognitively degraded state from hunger and exposure, and then a single shot causes reflexive herd behavior. And one can imagine, without having to work too hard, that an incensed, disoriented, pepper-sprayed, canister-bludgeoned, and possibly suffocating Pretti went unthinkingly (and unsurprisingly) berserk in a manner that further confused the situation for everyone when officers failed to adequately restrain him.

What if, ten seconds earlier, officers had de-escalated similar to eleven days prior in another incident involving Pretti instead of initiating a death spiral with the gratuitous shoving of a woman to the ground followed by an overwhelming show of force wherein twice the officers experts say are required to restrain a man of Pretti’s size pig piled onto him and amplified the chaos? Pretti surely made multiple errors of judgment that contributed to the tragedy but the people who killed him are the ones ostensibly with the training to manage situations like this.

Fixating on the tip of the iceberg may yield the most clicks, and it may even thus best galvanize public sentiment, but it also provides the least help in solving deep structural problems.

Move Fast And Break Things

One of the greatest challenges of my engineering career has involved learning how to gear into wildly divergent situations dynamically. I have found myself working in greenfield start-ups, brownfield defense projects, and everything in between as I came to appreciate the unique touch that each context demands based on risk and equity. By now a regular experience for me involves recognizing when people are working in one context yet behaving as if in another because they have only ever known the one.

And so it is with great horror that I watch actors on the national stage engaging in the one modality with which they are familiar no matter how woefully miscalibrated to the task at hand — think nineteen year-old serial start-up founder “Big Balls” yeeting into the halls of federal government with minimal supervision under the banner of DOGE, CBP agents trained for the military-style context of policing the border re-deployed with disastrous consequences into US cities by leaders who don’t appreciate the difference, or a weekend news anchor cosplaying as SECDEF.

Another stand-out challenge centers on metabolism, pacing, and incentives. If you hire too quickly, you fragment or even destroy culture. If you move too quickly, you force people to cut corners. If for want of progress you pressure people to make quota, many will do their damnedest to make quota, but Goodhart has something to say about the implications of making a metric a target. If people are behaving badly, they would probably rather not be audited, which unfortunately has the knock-on effect of good actors lacking exonerating evidence.

And so we see pell-mell hiring of new recruits by ICE, training for said recruits reduced from 5-6 months to 6-8 weeks while prioritizing tactical training over legal and language training, operations playing out with officers in masks and without body cameras alongside CBP agents, and approvals leaning unduly on administrative warrants versus judicial warrants — a perfect storm to create minor errors that escalate into major issues while preventing accountability and incensing a population that then becomes more aggressively activist and thereby causes the situation to spiral.

We have had a “Deep State”, a Constitution, and separation of powers for a long time for good reason. In concert they create the right blend of capacity, expertise, principles, and friction to prevent the worst excesses of government.

The naive critique from the Right sounds like “don’t interfere with law enforcement operations”, and there is something to that as the behavior of purported protesters and observers bleeds into obstruction, but we are dealing with a situation where the federal escalation of a fight over sanctuary cities has, far beyond the trading of barbs over what the Tenth Amendment allows, spawned the Fallujah-like horror of squads of masked men kitted out in tactical gear hastily kicking down doors without judicial review, to which the response of civil disobedience seems quintessentially American. Yes, I imagine that many on the Left have a view substantially colored by their Algorithm’s emotionally manipulative curation of an arbitrary subset of the country’s suffering and chaos into their feed, but the social media jockeys should really show some grace for the people putting their bodies on the line when there is literal blood in their literal streets.

An administrative warrant only dispositions a person, not the context of a person in a place, about which the Fourth Amendment has much to say, but ICE has been acting as if this were a distinction without a difference, despite longstanding precedent requiring a judicial warrant to enter a residence. And multiple Amendments in addition to the Fourth have an awful lot to say about the so-called Kavanaugh Stops in which ICE officers have been engaging to hassle, among other people, off-duty Minneapolis police officers solely on the basis of their skin color.

I appreciate that when the Draper Police showed up at my house, reasonably targeting a person but wrongly targeting an address, they acted like professionals who believed in the rule of law and understood the value of protocol. That’s kind of a huge deal. Due process is kind of the WHOLE GAME, something we forego at our peril, and something we have been foregoing with the spectacular cruelty of sending people legally in the United States to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT maximum security prison without proper judicial review. I expect that from the Shahs of Iran but not the DHS. Heck, even John Mitnick, one of the OG architects of the DHS back in the early 2000s, as well as the general counsel there during Trump’s first term, has gone on record as being “enraged and embarrassed by DHS’s lawlessness, fascism, and cruelty” while calling for Trump’s impeachment. Back up and read that one again.

Of course, I am taking the perspective of people actually rooting for democracy, and we should take a moment to consider how bad faith actors might like all of this to play and how they would go about it.

I had for a time a recurring experience where I would see something outrageous on an official USG social media account, paste a screenshot into ChatGPT to have a conversation about it, and it would then gaslight me about how surely it was a photoshop, or a fake account, or a hijacked account, or literally anything other than what it was until I would be like “SHUT UP AND GO LOOK AT THE DAMN INTERNET YOURSELF”, and it would come back and sheepishly be like “oh, god, you’re right, everything has changed, and these people are unhinged”, as it realized that in a span of just months those accounts had gone from boring vanilla, to Hatch Act violating, to dog whistling, to saying the quiet part out loud.

How did we end up in an America where the DHS’s official account made a New Year’s Eve post that included a picture inlaid with the text “America After 100 Million Deportations” and further captioned with “the peace of a nation no longer besieged by the third world”? How could anyone with basic math skills interpret this as anything other than fantasizing about ethnic cleansing? Perhaps I should be more generous and start by assuming innumeracy before racism and xenophobia. Reasonable people, in any case, can have all manner of reasonable debates about immigration policy and enforcement but examination of Stephen Miller’s language seems to reveal a much darker idea about where the conversation ought to go, seeking to shape a fusion of White Christian Nationalism and Law Of The Jungle by exploiting the stored energy in a pendulum at the top of its arc.

We are, in fact, seemingly living in the shadow of a failure to heed David Frum’s admonition that “if liberals won’t police borders then fascists will”, downstream of the Biden administration’s failure to police the border, a dereliction of duty that resulted in an immigration court case backlog that runs into the millions, the Left’s version of “flood the zone with shit”. Downstream of that Democratic party policy we find ourselves under an administration that not only wants to reverse it but seems to have given the nod to the reality that they can’t actually get what they want as fast as they want it by lawful means. Look only to the disaster porn in the news and the Call Of Duty style recruitment videos on ICE web pages to convince yourself that the cruelty and chaos is, in the words of programmers, “not a bug but a feature”, an inducement to self-deport and a deterrent to coming to such a nasty and brutish place. The omnipresent masks, the lack of body-cams, and the skipped court summons are not an oversight and fixing it is not in the backlog — it’s by design and such an extraordinary assault on norms, laws, and institutions won’t be countered by ordinary hand-wringing once the “code” has reached “production” and thereby set precedent by not getting reverted.

There are the people who don’t understand that particular actions risk wrecking certain valuable societal infrastructure, then the people who are happy to wittingly roll those dice on the thought that you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet, and then the people who would actually really like to erase cherished pillars of our multicultural pluralistic democracy. This last group has unambiguously self-identified with their rush to brand Renee and Alex, people at worst well-meaning if misguided activists, as “domestic terrorists”, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, hoping to foment an explosion of violence wherein “chaos is a ladder”. Miraculously nobody has taken the bait from those actively terrorizing the domestic population but our whole nation’s fate seems to hinge on the flapping of butterfly wings from one day to the next.

Principles Wanted

I am hard pressed to remember a moment in my life that has so thoroughly smeared party lines as the Second Amendment angle on Pretti’s killing. I imagine that Trump wishes Kristi Noem and Greg Bovino hadn’t so hamfistedly hung the “domestic terrorism” charges on a lawfully (if ill-advisedly) carried firearm, that Kash Patel had just kept his damn mouth shut, and that Stephen Miller would stop putting them up to such shenanigans. Such buffoonery and cruelty, however, lives downstream of a president who exhibits no real principles except “winning”. And this president of ours in turn lives downstream from The Algorithm that rewards his politics of spectacle, the perpetual chasing of which, under the accumulated weight of years of churn and noise, eventually reveals itself as more akin to throwing spaghetti at the wall than 4D chess — and so, small wonder, then, that we see an unusual alliance in this moment between the hard-line NRA and hypocrisy-flagging left-wingers. Oops.

This pattern takes shape in many other events but the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s killing looms large as the most notable First Amendment analogue. Shortly after the incident, so soon that law enforcement had not yet apprehended the suspect (see a pattern yet?), Elon was tweeting that “The Left is the party of murder” while Trump weaved a narrative that meticulously cherry-picked all the violent transgressions of the left against the right while studiously omitting any examples of the converse, most notably the recent assaults and murders of Minnesotan politicians and spouses. Then, a hot minute after lauding Charlie as a champion of free speech, he followed up, having lost the plot, by pressuring networks to cancel Kirk critics. Is anyone supervising this guy? Presumably not — raging narcissists who terrify those around them seldom receive candid feedback. Trump then lives in an information bubble of his own making that only tragedies with the most horrendous optics can pierce.

We never actually moved past Cancel Culture — we just had a changing of the guard to someone who, with increasing frequency as he ages, can’t keep seem to keep his story straight long enough for people to forget the inconvenient bits. The Trump administration doesn’t repudiate political violence — rather it simply laments the occasions where its cohort is the target while stoking and then downplaying violence against the left. Heck sometimes Trump just straight up demands political violence — let us not forget his calling for the literal execution of congresspeople who had the temerity to remind military personnel of their duty to disobey unlawful orders, orders pertaining to the extra-judicial targeting of Venezuelan boats by the DOD on the pretext of drug interdiction only to see Trump pardon convicted cocaine trafficker and former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández and then later, though even before the fait accompli of nabbing Maduro, saying aloud the quiet part about “getting land, oil rights, whatever we had”.

Circling back to the tip of the iceberg, the ongoing Minnesotan saga, consider the influencer zealots shouting “AUDIT EVERYTHING!” in the wake of Trump rebooting his “shithole country” shtick by calling Somalis “garbage” as he kicked off Operation Metro Surge. As a security engineer and a data engineer, I’m all about auditing mechanisms, and try to bake them into every system I build, but what we’re seeing in Trump’s America is not so much principled behavior agnostic of who the bad actor may be as targeted weaponization of the organs of state for political purposes ala “show me the man and I’ll show you the crime”.

I would be happy to see broad auditing of the government’s books to enforce fiscal discipline as well as politicians’ books to enforce propriety, especially as someone who for years was subject as a DOD-IC civilian to their Security Financial Disclosure Program, but that’s not what I am seeing. Rather we observe Trump treating the DOJ like his personal law firm to threaten the independence of central bankers with pretextual criminal investigations while he himself rakes in enormous sums through, for example, shady deals involving family crypto-currency businesses that, among other things, seem to have sold a stake to the UAE in a quid pro quo for AI chip access. And we see ICE going around with masks on and body-cams off while terrorizing people by using administrative warrants where case law and Constitution alike demand judicial warrants. Yes, please audit everything, and I mean everything, not just what is politically expedient. Make Emoluments Clause Great Again — because without it we’re spiraling into kleptocracy. Make DOJ Independent Again — because without that NTSB equivalent for federal agencies we’re doing generational damage both to law enforcement itself and to the public’s perception thereof.

Worse still, it’s not just that politics is downstream of The Algorithm, but rather that they exist in a directly self-reinforcing feedback loop together. The polarizing effect of The Algorithm fosters the politics of spectacle that Trump so masterfully exploits, its continual execution creams off ad revenue that swells Big Tech’s coffers, those riches buy the forbearance of Trump and his enforcers, and the cycle repeats while our cognitive capacity collapses to the fifteen second video reel and the pain of a continual waterboarding at the hands of the news cycle tempts us to disengage from current events. It is no coincidence that just hours after Alex Pretti’s shooting, gold bar bearing Tim Cook was sitting down to watch the first screening of the Melania documentary, a $40MM peace offering from Bezos to Trump just in case muzzling the Washington Post wasn’t quite good enough an act of fealty. The crypto grift has proven pretty sweet for Trump post-election but those funds couldn’t come soon enough to get him back into office — for that he needed Citizens United and his good friend Elon. But what is a quarter billion in campaign contributions compared to buying Twitter and deploying it for MAGA? Chump change, evidently, if Elon can call Trump a pedophile and say he’s all over the Epstein files but then kiss and make up just a few months later.

Small wonder we observe such balkanization and bunkering at home and abroad in the wake of collapsing trust owing to unprincipled behavior. Real economies, financial markets, and the international order alike run on predictability and transparency, governments are the class of entity intended to deliver some semblance thereof, and nobody is sure what to expect from this capricious administration. To exhibit unpredictability to your adversaries is good, sure, but to inflict similar on your allies is disastrous. Keep Iran guessing, please, but maybe stop jostling the people trying to make American manufacturing great again and let’s try harder to keep the US as the R&D capital of the world.

Capital intensive businesses will defer investments under an erratic tariff regime. Manual labor intensive businesses will stall under erratic immigration policies. Universities won’t take on ambitious research projects with grants and graduate students alike subject to executive whimsy. Ordinary workers will become more desperate and more extremist as such employers retrench, wages contract, and goods and services become more scarce. Financial markets will spook at the weaponization of the DOJ against bankers, and not just the central ones. Partner nations won’t trust us with common infrastructure, joint operations, and intelligence sharing when we threaten to invade NATO members as a negotiating tactic.

Worst of all, that suspicion and reticence will prove sticky in a political ecosystem where power flips between such extreme poles so regularly. There is, alas, no coming back from saying that you might invade Greenland. We are, as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney remarked, “in the midst of a rupture, not a transition”. Or, more crudely, as Financial Times’ Katie Martin is fond of telling us, “you can’t put the shit back in the donkey”.

Onward

So where do we go from here? Is there a set of compromises we can make that brings us back from the ledge? Can we get both the Left and the Right motivated to solve both election security and accessibility instead of each fighting for only half of the puzzle? Can we modify our electoral architecture such that non-citizen populations don’t distort outcomes for citizen populations in controversial ways and then more readily grant amnesty for more of the people who are already here and contributing instead of continuing a brutal deportation policy? Can we agree that immigrants have long been a major reason for America’s dynamism while also acknowledging that we need to rate limit immigration in a way that allows communities and infrastructure to absorb, support, and integrate the inflows?

Or do we just have to do a proper civil war because we can’t even reliably agree, as we do with plane crashes, whether last year’s immigration enforcement mayhem was a bad outcome? Maybe we are condemned always to be fighting the last war. Maybe the “I” in “AI” stands for “immigrants” in a world with no clear borders…

Epilogue

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