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, 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 only recently relocated to Minneapolis from Kansas City, Missouri. The family settled on 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 apparently was never 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 he never knew her to participate in a protest of any kind. He said she was 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 recordings show the self-defense argument is “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 in front of the vehicle pulls his weapon and immediately fires at least two shots into the vehicle at close range.
The entire 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.
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 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 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 15 and 12. Her 6-year-old son was from her second marriage.
Her ex-husband said she was primarily a stay-at-home mom in recent years but 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.”
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Biesecker reported from Washington and Mustian from New York. Associated Press writer Heather Hollingsworth in Kansas City, Missouri, contributed.
