A cold blooded abuse of power

This is not a commentary I wanted to write, yet I am desperately compelled to tell the truth as I see it.

The ICE agent killing of Minneapolis, Minnesota motorist and mother, 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good on January 7th of last week was, in my opinion, nothing short of a cold-blooded and senseless abuse of power.

No, I’m not stating that as a liberal ideologue, or purely because I’m someone who wants to stick it to the Trump Administration so bad I’m willing to reach long and hard for any outrage I can to make a point.

A precious life was lost here, in a perfect storm situation that literally forced me, after watching various angles of the tragic incident repeatedly, and then synchronizing the vital pieces together, to conclude that Renee Good wasn’t attempting to kill anyone with her vehicle, let alone a masked federal agent of the United States government.

And I'm deliberately not calling what happened to Renee Good "cold-blooded murder" as other commentators have because "murder," like manslaughter, is a legal term of art, and no judge or jury has made that official determination. 

 Yet.

She was trying to flee a tense situation where two angry masked ICE agents had just pulled up, coming towards her in her vehicle, with one of them then grabbing her car door with one hand, while reaching inside through the open driver’s side window with the other.

Ms. Good did all she immediately could to get away from the ICE agents by quickly turning her wheel to the right AWAY from them on the left while they demanded that she “get out of the f--king car."

She wasn’t interested in hitting or harming the ICE agent directly in front of her. In fact, she even backed up in order to give herself room to make a sharp right turn away from the other ICE agents' threats.

Here are some the facts the world already knows, based on various videos that have been released to the news media, not created by AI, and can be found online on YouTube if you objectively watch.

Ms. Good’s vehicle was partially blocking traffic on a snowy, one-way neighborhood, ice covered street. Some speculate that she had just dropped her six-year-old child off at school. Others say that she was blocking ICE vehicles operating in the neighborhood, and on that block. There is video of her vehicle partially blocking traffic, while ICE agents are down the block, apparently trying to decide what to do about the situation at least three minutes before the fatal incident.

Whatever the reason, when we first see what eventually happens from the rear in the first video, a silver pickup truck with lights and siren is just pulling up to the scene where Ms. Good’s maroon SUV is sitting in the street, motor running.

At least two masked ICE agents get out and immediately walk towards Ms. Good’s vehicle, sternly ordering her to get out. She remains behind the wheel, apparently refusing to comply. One of the ICE agents then grabs Good’s driver’s side door handle and pulls, while also reaching inside the driver’s side window to grab her. Apparently frightened, we see Ms. Good’s vehicle suddenly back up slightly, then make a sharp right to get away.

By this time, a third ICE agent, identified as Jonathan Ross, who apparently came out of a gray SUV with an open driver’s door parked right next to Ms. Good’s vehicle, suddenly appears in front of her vehicle as she is attempting to get away.

As her SUV backs up, then turns right, he has pulled a gun and begins firing three shots as Ms. Good’s vehicle continues to traverse right in front of him, ultimately speeding uncontrollably down the street, veering left, and crashing into the rear of a parked car.

So ends the first video the world saw, apparently taken by a bystander on the street who watched and taped the tragic incident on his cellphone.

But that first video raised a lot of questions.

What happened before those ICE agents pulled up and engaged Ms. Good in her vehicle?

Was she traveling alone?

Were words exchanged between Ms. Good and any of the masked ICE agents, and what was the tone and tenure of those remarks?

When at least one of the ICE agents grabs for the driver’s door, is he trying to grab her out or gain control of her vehicle?

Where did that third masked ICE agent, Ross, who seemingly appeared out of nowhere in front of Ms. Good’s vehicle and fired his weapon, come from? Did he ever order her to stop before discharging his weapon?

If there was another person riding in Ms. Good’s vehicle, where were they during this incident?

Some, but not all of those pertinent questions, were answered with the release on January 9th of first-person video from ICE Agent Ross, who fatally shot Ms. Good. When Ross's cellphone video begins, we actually see him, from his perspective, swing open his driver’s door and walk over to Ms. Good’s vehicle on his immediate left. Did he call for the backup that arrived in the silver pickup truck with lights and sirens?

So Ross was driving the gray SUV that was parked next to Ms. Good’s maroon SUV on the right, having arrived there before the other two ICE agents, who had pulled up on her left.

ICE Agent Ross is using a cellphone, not a body cam, to record Good’s car, which means he’s using one of his hands to hold the cellphone up to look through. That fact becomes very important seconds later when he feels forced to stop holding his cellphone and grab for his weapon.

Ross walks in front of her vehicle, taping Ms. Good behind the wheel. She has her driver’s window down with her arm outside, both hands visible and is smiling in nonthreatening good spirits. She says, "That's fine, dude. I'm not mad at you. I'm not mad at you."                                                           

 ICE Agent Ross continues to walk past Ms. Good, taping the rest of her vehicle, moving to the back where he tapes her license plate. Good’s wife, Becca, who was riding with Renee, meets him behind the vehicle, and says something else to him as she tapes the officer with her cellphone. For the record, Becca is talking a lot of smack to ICE Agent Ross, seemingly trying to get on his nerves. Ms. Good, however, is never seen or heard taking that posture.

 ICE Agent Ross continues to work his way up towards the front of Ms. Good’s vehicle on the right passenger side, still taping with his cell. Becca says something else to him and then turns to grab the passenger-side door handle to get in the front seat.                                                     

It is when ICE Agent Ross has reached the front and positions himself directly facing Ms. Good behind the wheel, that one of the other arriving ICE agents has already begun to reach in and seem to grab both the door and inside. That's when wife Becca shouts "Drive, baby, drive!"                                          

 Renee Good panics, reverses her vehicle, then furiously begins turning the front wheel to the right to get away from the agent grabbing into her window.                                                            

It’s then that ICE Agent Ross stops holding his cellphone, pulls his weapon, fires at least once through the front windshield, and then twice more as Ms. Good’s vehicle completes its turn, and careens down the street and crashes. She's been hit in the head at least once.                                       

How do I know Ms. Good panicked?

Let’s go back to the first bystander rear video.

The last time we saw Good’s wife, Becca, she is reaching to open the front passenger door to take her seat. Except she never makes it inside the vehicle. She has ordered Renee to pull off because of one of the two ICE agents is trying to grab on to the driver's side door while saying, "Get out the f--king car!"

By the time Becca attempts to open the front passenger door, the ICE agent on the driver’s side has engaged Good and is reaching for the door and inside in an attempt to forcibly get her out of her SUV. Meanwhile ICE Agent Ross has already made his way back in front of Good, sees her put her vehicle in reverse, then furiously turn her wheel to the right in an attempt to get away from the other ICE agent trying to apprehend her. He pulls his weapon and fires.

All of this is literally happening in three seconds or less. Good is fatally shot as her vehicle lurches to the right, and Becca never gets in. We know this because in the first rear video, we see Renee's wife still standing where Good’s vehicle was.                                           

 But also importantly, we see ICE Agent Ross still standing after firing the three shots, NOT knocked to the ground or "run over" in anyway as first alleged by Pres. Trump. If Ross is feeling any pain from being hit by anything, he's not showing it.

                                                

On the second video, we see ICE agents not doing much in response to an obvious serious car accident, and we hear one of the agents immediately say matter-of-factly, “ f—king b—ch.” (most likely Ross since it's heard on his cellphone video). I guess that's macho man speak for "I just fatally shot an unarmed woman who called me dude."

 

I challenge anyone and everyone to review those two videos of the incident, match up the actions of everyone as I described them here, and maintain that Renee Nicole Good, mother of three, was trying to kill anybody.

 

In fact, if she was really the dangerous left-wing "terrorist" the Trump Administration is working so hard to make her out to be in death, then why didn’t she try to run ICE Agent Ross over the first time he walked in front of her vehicle before the other ICE agents arrived? When he was standing directly in front of her the second time, why not just gun the car forward, instead of frantically turn her wheel away from him and the other ICE agents? Why didn’t she try to back over him when he was standing behind her vehicle with his cellphone recording her license plate? A true terrorist wouldn’t miss ripe opportunities like those.

 

No, she was trying to get away from aggressive ICE agents, the same kind of federal agents who were known to break the driver’s side window of someone’s vehicle in Charlotte weeks ago, and drag him out to the ground before taking him away to GOD knows where.

 

Advocates for the ICE agents say Good was deliberately blocking traffic to slow them down. Ok, but according to the first rear video, ICE agents, when they arrived on the scene, didn't give Good a chance to comply with any orders to leave and stop blocking traffic. No, ordering someone to "get out the f--king car" while you're walking at a clip towards them, then grabbing their car door and reaching inside is not what a police officer, trained to deescalate touchy situations, would do. Ms. Good was confronted by wolf pack behavior, in my opinion, and it frightened her into an unfortunate, but understandable, reaction.

One ICE agent may have pulled the trigger, but Renee Good found herself being aggressively confronted by several ICE agents, and panicked so much, she even frantically drove off before her wife could safely get in the car.

That’s how afraid she was, and to me, was the key here as to what her true motivation was. When Renee Good backed up suddenly and turned that steering wheel furiously away from the threatening ICE agents, her true motivation was fear, so much so that she left her wife just standing there alone. She never gave her wife, Becca, a chance to get in.

The same way one of those ICE agents verbally and cold-heartedly spit on Renee Good’s grave, right after she had fatally crashed her vehicle after being  shot, Vice Pres. J.D. Vance, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and of course, the "acting president" of Venezuela, slandered the dead woman, calling her a “domestic terrorist,” “radical leftist” and “professional agitator.”

None of these people bothered to use a term the rest of the world quite frankly would prefer - human being.

Now, I'm going to try to be fair here, though I'm also going to be critical of ICE Agent Ross. Part of the problem was that he wasn't wearing a body cam, which would have freed both of his hands up in case of an emergency. In this case, when he was in front of Renee's SUV the second time, his attention is on focusing and taping on his cellphone, instead of seeing what is actually happening through his eyes. So when he sees Renee doing something that seems threatening, instinct, not training, takes over, and he discharges his weapon to protect himself from a perceived threat.

First of all, even though ICE Agent Ross has a reported ten years experience as a federal ICE officer, experts maintain that he doesn't have urban policing training, which dictates that you NEVER place yourself in front of a suspect vehicle, and as a vehicle is leaving, you never fire into it because, by definition, the threat is passing you.

Plus, having the cellphone in his hand was a distraction, contributing to his reaction of self-defense. But all of what I've just described is a piece of an overall monumental screwup on the part of this ICE agent operation, in my opinion.

Oh, and I certainly don't appreciate the disgusting slur that was used by at least one ICE officer (most likely Ross)  to describe the deceased and defenseless victim of their lawlessness. I'm sure their bosses enjoyed it, however.

Absolutely the state of Minnesota should be allowed to investigate this tragic crime that occurred within its borders, despite federal roadblocks. How else are we to really get the truth?

But it is a damn shame that during a week where Trump already had blood on his hands per the illegal invasion of Venezuela, and was angling to further use U.S. military force to keep his hands bloody, that a young, American woman should lose her precious and innocent life because of his madness. 

Hats off to all of the non-Fox News Sunday shows for digging deeper into the video to figure out what really happened, and having administration officials on as guests to justify their blatant lies that Renee Good was some kind of "domestic terrorist" who set out to hurt "helpless" ICE agents. As a close examination of the evidence we already have in the public domain shows, she was anything BUT a terrorist. 

Renee Good was a frightened human being and an American citizen who needlessly and senselessly died at the hands of her own government. 

Of course, if you prefer to wallow in the filth of Trump lies and deceit, then you saw on Fox News where White House Deputy Chief of Staff and all-around madman Stephen Miller got on and called Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey "terrorists."

 Sick.

 What a disgrace! And now DHS Sec. Kristi Noem brazenly says she's sending 1,000 more untrained federal immigration officers to Minneapolis to boost the number to 3,000. Minnesota just sued in federal court to have them removed. Remember, these agents do not coordinate with local police, who DO know how to conduct themselves in a urban setting because they're trained for it. These Trump ICE agents are glorified bounty hunters in khakis with blood smeared badges and itchy trigger fingers. And amazingly, they are still in Minneapolis, using mace, physical force and tear gas on citizens, as well was grabbing people out of their vehicles. Reportedly, ICE has arrested over 2,400 people there.

What exactly is Trump trying to prove?

Go ahead, watch the first and last videos. Take notes. See if you see what I see. An American citizen, her young life senselessly taken from her, simply because she was trying to escape the clutches of Trump’s masked strongmen.

I see a crime, most likely manslaughter. A cold-blooded abuse of power, followed by a shameful, immediate smear campaign launched by cowards of the highest order, long, long before a professional and objective criminal investigation can be conducted by any honest fact-finding agency the Trump Administration doesn’t already have its claws into. 

That's why Renee Good's family has announced a civil investigation into her death conducted by a law firm.  Good’s family has hired famed civil rights attorney Antonio Romanucci, who successfully sued Minnesota and Minneapolis on behalf of the family of George Floyd, the black man killed by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020.  Romanucci says suing the federal government will be tricky because of various immunity clauses, but that he will get justice for Renee Good. 

   Also, MS NOW (formerly MSNBC) has reported that "...At least four leaders of a Justice Department unit that investigates police killings have resigned in protest over the administration’s handling of the fatal shooting of a motorist in Minneapolis by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer, according to three people briefed on the departures." 

 The Washington Post has put that number at at least five resignations.

  The WP also adds that several prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney's office in Minnesota have also resigned because they were ordered to investigate Renee's wife, Becca Good, and they refused. These are obviously career prosecutors who want no part of what they see as a shameless political smear campaign.

  And now there's reporting from The NY Times that Trump's Dept. of Justice is trying to link Renee Good to any left-wing "activist groups" they can further smear her with. So it should surprise no one that the Justice Dept. has announced that there will be no investigation to determine whether Renee Good's civil rights were violated.

Meanwhile, ALL citizens in Minneapolis are under military occupation by masked men with guns who enjoy governmental immunity against any crime they commit. Thus people are being beaten, dragged out of their cars, and having the doors to their homes kicked down by masked men with weapons, bad attitudes, and no warrants.

The husk is clearly coming off the corn here, folks!

Please pay attention, because what has happened to Renee Nicole Good can now happen to any one of us - dastardly smear and all! In the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose birthday and national holiday most decent people commemorate this week going into next, we should be demanding justice.

As you read this, Minneapolis is dealing with another ICE agent shooting, this time wounding a Venezuelan national.

And 2026 has only just begun!