MINNEAPOLIS — 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 dropped off her youngest child at an elementary school in Minneapolis, according to the Associated Press.
While Trump administration officials continued to describe the encounter as an attempted ram and painted Good as a domestic terrorist, members of Good’s family, friends and neighbors mourned her in the days after her death. The AP reported that video and community recollections are at odds with the administration’s framing, and that residents on the street where she was killed put up messages calling for justice and asking reporters not to come to their homes.
Good, her 6-year-old son and her wife had only recently relocated to Minneapolis from Kansas City, Missouri. Neighbors described the area as a quiet residential stretch with homes and multifamily buildings, some with pride flags and holiday lights, and an AP account said that, a day after Good’s death, at least one handwritten sign posted to a front door read “NO MEDIA INQUIRES” and “JUSTICE FOR RENEE.”
In the administration’s account relayed by the AP, Good was characterized as a domestic terrorist who attempted to ram federal agents with her Honda Pilot. The AP reported that Good was a U.S. citizen born in Colorado and that she apparently had never been charged with anything beyond a single traffic ticket.
Good’s social media presence, as described by the AP, depicted her as “poet and writer and wife and mom,” and included posts that said she was “experiencing Minneapolis,” along with a pride emoji on her Instagram account. The AP also described a Pinterest profile picture showing Good smiling and holding a young child, alongside 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, told the AP that Good was no activist and that he never knew her to participate in a protest of any kind. He said she was headed home before the encounter with ICE agents on a snowy street.
State and local officials and protesters, the AP reported, have rejected the Trump administration’s characterization of the shooting. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said video recordings show the self-defense argument is “garbage.”
The AP said bystander video posted to social media shows an officer approaching Good’s car, demanding she open the door and grabbing the handle, and that when she begins to pull forward, a different ICE officer standing in front of the vehicle pulls his weapon and immediately fires at least two shots into the vehicle at close range. The AP reported that the entire incident lasted less than 10 seconds. In another video taken immediately after the shooting, a distraught woman is seen wailing, “That’s my wife, I don’t know what to do!”
Calls and messages to Good’s wife received no response, according to the AP.
On Thursday, a few dozen people gathered on the one-way street where Good was killed, blocking the road with steel drums filled with burning wood for warmth to ward off freezing rain. Passersby stopped to pay their respects at a makeshift memorial with bouquets of flowers and a hand-fashioned cross.
The AP reported that Good’s ex-husband described her as a devoted Christian who took part in youth mission trips to Northern Ireland when she was younger. He said she loved to sing, participating in a chorus in high school and studying vocal performance in college.
Good studied creative writing at Old Dominion University in Virginia, and the AP reported that she won a prize in 2020 for one of her works, citing a post on the school’s English department Facebook page. Kent Wascom, who taught Good in the creative writing program at Old Dominion, recalled her as “incredibly caring of her peers,” and told the AP that “What stood out to me in her prose was that, unlike a lot of young fiction writers, her focus was outward rather than inward,” adding that her presence helped make a classroom a “really supportive place.”
The AP reported that Good had a daughter and a son from her first marriage, now 15 and 12, and that her 6-year-old son was from her second marriage. It also reported that her mother, Donna Ganger, told the Minnesota Star Tribune that the family was notified of the death late Wednesday morning and that Ganger described her as “one of the kindest people I’ve ever known,” saying she was “extremely compassionate” and “She’s taken care of people all her life.”