Creekside United Methodist Vigil
Community Vigil for Renee Nichole and Alex Pretti
After the terrible executions of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Katherine Evatt of Amador County kindly organized a vigil. The vigil was held on Sunday, January 26th, 2026 at the Creekside United Methodist Church in Sutter Creek. Rev. Mark Smith, the pastor of the Creekside United Methodist Church offered prayers. An impromptu choir led the gathering of about 70 people singing hymns and songs with lyrics for the occasion.
The following is a prayer offered by Richard Miles.
We gather tonight to mourn. To remember. To tend to broken hearts.
We come together here tonight because silence would make us complicit, and doing nothing would mean accepting a world where lives are taken and nothing changes.
In our tradition, we begin by naming what is sacred: every human life, every breath, every soul.
Our wisdom teaches that when even one single life is lost, the world itself does not remain whole.
We remember Renee Nicole Macklin Good, a mother of three, whose love did not end with her last breath.
We remember Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an ICU nurse and healer, who spent his days caring for our veterans.
We remember too, Liam, five years old, taken from his preschool, from his friends and his mommy, still wearing his knitted bunny hat.
And we hold close the living: Becca, Rene’s wife; Rene’s children; Alex’s family and Liam’s; and all whose hearts are now cracked open by grief.
May they not be left alone with their sorrow. May our community stretch far to gather around them like a sheltering wall.
Our tradition teaches that the heart is fragile because it matters. That grief is not weakness; it is love with nowhere to go. And that when hearts are broken, they must be held before they can be mended.
As a Jewish child raised in the long shadow of the Holocaust, I was taught words that were meant as a vow: Never Again. Not as a slogan, but as a moral demand, that power be restrained, that human life be guarded, that cruelty never be normalized.
We speak those words not because they are easy, but because even broken hearts can still believe that the world can be made whole once again.
Source of compassion, hear our prayers. Hold Renee, Alex, and Liam, gently and without fear.
Source of Mercy, shelter them in the Garden of Eden, and bind their lives to everlasting meaning.
And may mercy also rest upon the living, on hearts bent by grief, on spirits exhausted by sorrow, on a community aching to mend the breach.
May their memory not let us rest.
May it disturb our comfort and fracture our silence.
May it follow us home and refuse to be laid gently to sleep.
Let no prayer absolve us of responsibility. Let no power claim innocence while lives are snuffed out in the street. But let our mourning soften us, not harden us.
Let our tears carve space for compassion in our words and deeds.
Let healing begin where hearts are broken and spread outward into how we live.
Renee and Alex, May their memory be a blessing, a blessing that heals, a blessing that inspires us to action, a blessing that demands we care for the immigrant, the stranger, and all those among us living in fear, a blessing that refuses to let despair have the final word.
May their memory be a blessing and may we prove worthy of their memory by what we do next.
And let us say “Amen.”
