The Murder of Renee Good

 

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Before Renee Good was fatally shot behind the wheel of her vehicle by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer, the 37-year-old mother of three had dropped off her youngest child at an elementary school in Minneapolis, the newest city she called home.

While Trump administration officials continued Thursday to paint Good as a domestic terrorist who attempted to ram federal agents with her Honda Pilot, members of her family, friends and neighbors mourned a woman they remembered as gentle, kind and openhearted.

Good, her 6-year-old son and her wife had only recently relocated to Minneapolis from Kansas City, Missouri. The family settled in a quiet residential street of older homes and multifamily buildings, some front porches festooned with pride flags still twinkling with holiday lights. A day after her death, neighbors had grown weary of talking to reporters. A handwritten sign posted to one front door read “NO MEDIA INQUIRES” and “JUSTICE FOR RENEE.”

Far from the worst-of-the-worst criminals President Donald Trump said his immigration crackdown would target, Good was a U.S. citizen born in Colorado who had apparently never have been charged with anything beyond a single traffic ticket.

In social media accounts, she described herself as a “poet and writer and wife and mom.” She said she was currently “experiencing Minneapolis,” displaying a pride emoji on her Instagram account. A profile picture posted to Pinterest shows her smiling and holding a young child against her cheek, along with posts about tattoos, hairstyles and home decorating.

Her ex-husband, who asked not to be named out of concern for the safety of their children, said Good was no activist and that he had never known her to participate in a protest of any kind. He said she was simply headed home before the encounter with a group of ICE agents on a snowy street.

State and local officials and protesters have rejected the Trump administration’s characterization of the shooting, with Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey saying video of the shooting shows the self-defense argument was “garbage.”

Video taken by bystanders posted to social media shows an officer approaching her car, demanding she open the door and grabbing the handle. When she begins to pull forward, a different ICE officer standing by the vehicle pulls his weapon and immediately fires at least two shots into the vehicle at close range. The entire deadly incident was over in less than 10 seconds.

In another video taken immediately after the shooting, a distraught woman is seen sitting near the vehicle, wailing, “That’s my wife, I don’t know what to do!” Calls and messages to Good’s wife received no response.

By Thursday, a few dozen people had gathered on the one-way street where Good was killed, blocking the roadway with steel drums filled with burning wood for warmth to ward of a pelting freezing rain. Passersby stopped to pay their respects at a makeshift memorial with bouquets of flowers and a hand-fashioned cross.

Good’s ex-husband said she was a devoted Christian who took part in youth mission trips to Northern Ireland when she was younger. She loved to sing, participating in a chorus in high school and studying vocal performance in college.

She studied creative writing at Old Dominion University in Virginia and won a prize in 2020 for one of her works, according to a post on the school’s English department Facebook page. She also hosted a podcast with her second husband, who died in 2023.

Kent Wascom, who taught Good in the creative writing program at Old Dominion, recalled her juggling the birth of her child with both work and school in 2019. He described her as “incredibly caring of her peers.”

“What stood out to me in her prose was that, unlike a lot of young fiction writers, her focus was outward rather than inward,” Wascom said. “A creative writing workshop can be a gnarly place with a lot of egos and competition, but her presence was something that helped make that classroom a really supportive place.”

Good had a daughter and a son from her first marriage, who are now ages 15 and 12. Her 6-year-old son was from her second marriage. 

Her ex-husband said she had primarily been a stay-at-home mom in recent years but had previously worked as a dental assistant and at a credit union. Donna Ganger, her mother, told the Minnesota Star Tribune the family was notified of the death late Wednesday morning. She did not respond to calls or messages from the AP.

“Renee was one of the kindest people I’ve ever known,” Ganger told the newspaper. “She was extremely compassionate. She’s taken care of people all her life. She was loving, forgiving and affectionate. She was an amazing human being.”

-from AP News, Biesecker reported from Washington and Mustian from New York. Associated Press writer Heather Hollingsworth in Kansas City, Missouri, contributed.

…Good’s killing is the ninth shooting by an immigration officer in the past four months, according to The New York Times. In September, an ICE officer shot and killed 38-year-old Silverio Villegas González in the Chicago suburb of Franklin Park. In early October in Chicago, Border Patrol agent Charles Exum shot Marimar Martinez five times. (The victim had originally been charged with assaulting federal agents, but the charges were dismissed after text messages were made public in which Exum wrote, “I fired 5 shots and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.”) 

On New Year’s Eve, an off-duty ICE agent shot and killed 43-year-old Keith Porter in Los Angeles when Porter was shooting off celebratory gunfire. 

Altogether, The Trace [Reporting on Guns and Gun Violence in America - The Trace] has identified 28 incidents in which federal agents have shot someone or held them at gunpoint during an immigration enforcement action — a number approaching the roughly 30 people believed to have died in ICE custody in 2025. Noting that its number is not a complete count, The Trace report believes that fully half of these incidents — 14 of 28 — have involved shootings.

They include the shootings of three people observing or documenting ICE raids; the shootings of five people driving away from traffic stops or evading an enforcement action; and the September 30 raid on a Chicago apartment building, during which half-asleep tenants and their children were held at gunpoint. At least four people have been killed, and five others have been injured…

-from Truthdig

...Multiple reports describe how Renee’s SUV became trapped as officers closed in, shouting conflicting commands to move her car out of the way and to step out of the vehicle. One agent tried to force his way into her car, and another fired fatal shots as she tried to pull away. In that chaos, the simple truth her ex repeats that she was “just driving home after dropping off her kid at school” cuts through the spin that tries to recast a scared parent as a threat. His insistence that she was not an activist shows how fast the system will twist an ordinary commute into a justification for lethal force...​

-from The Other 98%