A neighbor who witnessed an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shoot and kill a 37-year-old Minnesota mother blasted the Trump administration for claiming the agent fired in self-defense.
President Donald Trump and the Department of Homeland Security have said that Renee Nicole Good, a U.S. citizen who leaves behind a six-year-old son, was shot on Wednesday while trying to hit an ICE agent with her SUV.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has gone so far as to accuse Good of “domestic terrorism,” while Trump wrote on social media that she had succeeded in “viciously” running over an officer—despite video evidence to the contrary.
Now, one of the neighbors who filmed the deadly encounter has revealed to CNN’s Erin Burnett that Good was “totally peaceful” and that the graphic killing had “traumatized” her and the other neighbors.
“I don’t want to be here,” 39-year-old Emily Heller said during Wednesday’s edition of OutFront. “But I knew that this would be twisted and it would be ‘self-defense.’ And that’s absolutely not what happened,” she said. “I just can’t let this narrative that it was self-defense go any further because it’s absolutely not what it was.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the Department of Homeland Security for comment.
Heller was in her home making breakfast when she heard whistles warning there were immigration agents nearby and went out on her porch to see what was going on.
She saw an ICE convoy that seemed to be stuck after Good had blocked their path with their car. The agents were “completely organized,” she said, yelling at Good to “move, move, move” one moment and then trying to grab her car door and pry it open the next.
Good reversed her vehicle and turned her wheels to try to drive away, Heller continued.
“That’s when an ICE agent stepped in front of her vehicle and said, ‘Stop.’ And then—she was already moving—and then, point-blank shot her through her windshield in the face,” she said.
It all happened in about a minute, she added.
Afterward, the other agents gathered around the shooter, who seemed “spooked,” she continued.
“They seem like children,” she said. “They seem like untrained people. And so that agent was obviously spooked because he had just killed someone. And it was very obvious to everyone who had witnessed it all that she would not make it.”
A gold SUV came and ferried the shooter away from the scene.
In the video that Heller recorded, a doctor can be seen asking if he checked Good for a pulse, but the agents refuse, saying they have their own medics on the scene.
Asked by Burnett if the agents tried to assist Good with any “speed” or “desperation,” Heller shook her head.
“It was at least 15 minutes before the ambulance arrived, and then the ambulance couldn’t even get through because the ICE agents had all abandoned their vehicles in the road,” she said.
The ambulance parked at the end of the block and about five paramedics came and examined her. Heller said she later learned that the medics were with Good for just a few minutes.
“Then they carried her limp body away by her limbs, not even on a stretcher,” she said. “Just carried her down to the end of the block where they could get a stretcher, because they couldn’t get through with their ambulance.”
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