RENEE NICOLE GOOD – SAY HER NAME

 

In the same city and less than a mile from where George Floyd was murdered five years ago by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin—sparking nationwide protests and giving rise to the Black Lives Matter movement—Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was shot to death at pointblank range last Wednesday by ICE agent Jonathon Ross, in another incident clearly born of abuse of police power.

While Chauvin ended up going to prison for second-degree murder—and remains there—it seems unlikely anything at all will happen to Ross. Not, at least, as long as Donald Trump is in power. MAGA spin is already casting Ross as a victim, immune from prosecution, and under federal protection.

While the Trump administration has, typically, circled its wagons and sought—through heinously fabricated off-the-cuff statements by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Vice-President JD Vance and the president’s own unsubstantiated tweets—to cast Ross as a victim and Good as a dangerous “domestic terrorist”, nothing could be further from the truth. And if the Trump regime were not so all-powerful (thanks to the moral decay and obsequious prioritizing of raw power over constitutionality that the Republican Party is engaged in) its patently false claims would be ludicrous. But, under the circumstances, they are not. They are, instead, abusive, outrageous, tragic and an insult to the intelligence of the great majority of Americans. Only Trump-or-die MAGA minions could be obtuse enough to support and repeat such lies, which it’s hard to presume that, in their heart of hearts, they could actually believe.

Terminology is a funny thing. Certain words and phrases can have completely distinct meanings for different people. As the old saying goes, “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” But in Democratically-run cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Memphis, Charlotte, Minneapolis and elsewhere across the US, over the course of the past year, it is not at all hard to tell who is being terrorized and who is doing the terrorizing.

The Trump regime has been using US taxpayer dollars—using Americans’ own money against them, in other words—to send veritable invasion forces of ICE agents, Border Guards and National Guard troops into opposition-party cities to create the illusion of chaos in those places, and, clearly, to provoke an angry reaction from local governments and outraged citizens. To some of us, that seems a lot more like domestic terrorism than the peaceful protests that such aggressive and uncalled-for federal action has provoked.

Becca Good, Renee’s wife, has described Renee as “made of sunshine.”

“She literally sparkled,” Becca said. “I mean, she didn’t wear glitter, but I swear she had sparkles coming out of her pores. All the time.”

She said that Renee lived her life by authentic, deeply Christian values, not the least of which was her belief that every person, regardless of “where they came from or what they looked like,” deserved compassion and kindness. “Renee was a Christian who knew that all religions teach the same essential truth: we are here to love each other, care for each other, and keep each other safe and whole,” Becca said.

The Goods were new in town, but it was Renee’s Christian values that prompted her and Becca to stop for a few minutes on the way back from dropping off Renee’s six-year-old at school, and lending their support to fellow-residents protesting ICE’s presence in their neighborhood. Many of those peaceful protesters were people who had dropped their children off at the nearby elementary school and were upset that ICE had been deployed near their children’s school, since ICE has been known to make arrests at schools, churches and other normally off-limits locations for routine law enforcement actions.

“We had whistles,” Becca Good would say later. “They had guns.”

We only have video evidence of what happened from the time Renee’s car ended up crossed on the bias in the road in front of a spot where an ICE vehicle was stuck in the snow and agents had set up a sort of spontaneous roadblock.  In the video, Renee’s car is not blocking the road. She apparently signaled several vehicles to go around her and they had no problem doing so.

ICE agents reportedly first instructed her to leave. She appears in the video to be trying to do just that, backing up slowly to give her room to turn around. But then she is suddenly blocked in by another ICE vehicle, a Nissan pickup, carrying more agents. She signals it to go around as well, but instead, two agents in tactical gear descend from the truck.

It was then that masked agents moved to surround Renee’s SUV. One of them tried to yank open her door and said, “Get out of the car. Get out of the fucking car.” He didn’t tell her, as any even minimally trained police officer would have, to put the vehicle in park, turn off the engine and take the key out of the ignition. Had he done so, there may well have been a very different outcome.

It is today practically impossible not to have seen video footage of ICE agents who have occupied, unsolicited, numerous cities around the country, abusively smashing car windows, jerking people, without probable cause, from their vehicles onto the pavement, beating them up among several agents, pinning them to the ground and spiriting them away, un-Mirandized, to undisclosed locations. It is not hard to imagine, then, that anyone hearing the command to “get out of the fucking car” from a masked man with no identification might well panic.

I speculated at the time, after repeatedly seeing the videos of Renee’s death, that this had been the case. Indeed, Renee’s mother, Donna Ganger, told The Minnesota Star Tribune that the unsubstantiated description by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem of Renee as “a domestic terrorist” was “so stupid.” Ganger said that her daughter was “one of the kindest people I've ever known,” adding that, “she was probably terrified.”  

There was no altercation. There was indeed a discussion between one of the officers and Becca, who was obviously irritated that they were being bullied.

Becca Good, is standing on the street using her phone to film the interaction. She tells the ICE agent: “That's okay, we don't change our plates every morning just so you know. It will be the same plate when you come talk to us later.”

Apparently seeing anger in the agent she’s talking to, Becca adds: “You want to come at us? You want to come at us? I say go and get yourself some lunch, big boy.”

Renee’s own last words were,  “That's fine dude. I'm not mad at you.”

These women being cast as terrorists by the Trump regime—which, if the rule of law meant anything at all to them, wouldn’t even be commenting until a full and thorough investigation has been carried out (good luck with that!) appear to be anything but. They are a respectable same-sex couple with an aging dog in the back of their SUV, and they are coming back from dropping the driver’s six-year-old at elementary school.

Are they upset about the ICE paramilitary invading the streets of their newly adopted city and harassing anybody they wish, without due process or warrants? It seems so. But they have every reason to be upset and to peacefully protest, along with thousands of other Minneapolis neighbors. This is their home to which the federal government has sent a veritable invasion force, of masked, unidentified agents, given free rein to ignore basic human and civil rights.

It seems obvious to speculate that, seeing things escalating, and as a mother of three responsible for her family, Renee made a decision to go around the roadblock and flee the scene—or in other words, to flee from the imminent danger that was now perceptible as a masked agent ordered her to “get out of the fucking car.” In one of the video, you can see that she is turning her wheels to the right, in order to go around Ross and leave.

In the all of videos, including Ross’s own bodycam (which, given this Justice Department’s record for evidence-handling, we can’t be sure wasn’t doctored), it is clear that the shooter was never directly in front of the vehicle. He is standing to one side, and as Renee tries to leave—again, because that was what she was originally ordered to do—he appears to step into the side of the SUV, and to place his non-gun hand on the fender, before firing once, probably through the windshield, and then as the car passes him, firing twice more through the front side window, as if to make sure that he has killed the driver.

Three shots, all apparently aimed at Renee’s face. And then he can be heard to say, “Fucking bitch.” In what world is a trained, veteran agent and former soldier firing three pointblank shots into the face of an unarmed woman who is already passing him by consider “self-defense”? Especially when he punctuates the coup degras shot with the words, “fucking bitch.”

Let’s talk about Jonathon Ross’s experience, for a moment. This wasn’t one of the rookie MAGA recruits that the DHS has recently been scrounging up to flesh out the ranks of its rogue paramilitary. This was a guy with real, long-term experience in both military and police forces.

Ross was deployed to Iraq from 2004 to 2005, as a member of the  Indiana National Guard. He served as a machine-gunner on a gun truck, forming part of a combat patrol team. After he returned from Iraq in 2005, he went to college, two years later joining the Border Patrol near El Paso, Texas. He worked there from 2007 until 2015, serving as a field intelligence agent, whose job it was to gather and analyze information on drug cartels and on narcotics and human trafficking. He joined ICE as a deportation officer in 2015. In other words, this was no case of a rookie agent overreacting out of nerves and fear, and killing someone by mistake. This was a veteran agent and soldier employing deadly force to intentionally kill a citizen who had given him no reason to believe that she was an imminent threat to him or his fellow officers.

Much has been made of the fact that Ross was severely injured in another fairly recent vehicle stop in which he reached into a suspect’s car window as the suspect fled, and ended up being dragged for more than a block. His apologists are seeking to claim that he was suffering from PTSD as a result of that other incident. But if that was the case, why wasn’t he on modified assignment and being treated, instead of being back out on the street where he could be a danger to himself and others?

It should be noted that Ross walked away from the scene of Renee Good’s homicide unscathed, and that his fellow ICE agents refused to let a doctor on the scene who offered his help see the shooting victim. They said they had their own people and that they would be waiting for their medics.

Support for Renee Good’s survivors has been overwhelming. Neighbors started a Go Fund Me account to try and help her family defray the cost of her funeral and other out-of-pocket expenses arising from the tragedy. The goal was fifty thousand dollars. At last count, the donations came to 1.4 million. 

Kash Patel’s FBI claims to be carrying out a deadly force investigation of the incident. But with the president, DHS secretary and vice-president already having “tried” the case publicly and declared Ross innocent and immune, the FBI probe will, in all likelihood, be a scam. Meanwhile, the Trump regime has also declared this a federal case and has blocked the Minnesota authorities from investigating under state charges.

Renee was no stranger to sacrifice. Her father, Tim Ganger, told the Washington Post that, “She had a good life, but a hard life”. Despite that fact, she had managed to get a degree in English, pursuing her dream of being a writer. She was, indeed, an award-winning poet, and a hobby musician.

Renee’s mother summed up best what the people who knew her seem to agree on. According to Donna Ganger, “Renee was one of the kindest people I’ve ever known. 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.”