MINNEAPOLIS — Renee Nicole Good came to this city almost a year ago looking for a place that she, her wife and 6-year-old son could feel comfortable.
They seemed to have found it in the diverse, progressive stronghold on the south side of Minneapolis. “They wanted community,” said Kimmy Hull, a neighbor, who on Thursday stood on the porch of Good’s gray-blue two-story house, next to an inflatable penguin, snowman, Christmas tree and a “We Are Southside” sign stuck in the snowy lawn.
That community is grieving and hundreds of people are protesting, after Good, 37, was shot and killedWednesday morning blocks from her home by an ICE agent, who federal officials say fired in self-defense. Details of the shooting, which was captured in multiple videos by private citizens, are in dispute.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, told Fox News on Thursday that Good “was stalking agents all day long, impeding our law enforcement.” Asked by The Washington Post what she was basing that description on, McLaughlin said the information came from “firsthand accounts” from law enforcement officers who had been in contact with Good.
In multiple interviews this week, friends and family members painted a picture of a woman who lived a quiet life not shaped by overt activism — a sharp contrast to the allegations made by Vice President JD Vance, who blamed Good for her own death and accused her of perpetrating “an attack on federal law enforcement.”
Her family members have said they do not believe Good was an aggressive activist tailing ICE officers. She had just dropped her son at school, they said. Her father, Tim Ganger, in a brief interview Wednesday, said she got “caught up in a bad situation. I think she was just caught in the crossfire.”
Videos show Good’s maroon Honda Pilot parked across the road as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicles approach. ICE agents then confront her, demanding she get out of her car. A frame-by-frame analysis by The Post of the footage, however, raises questions about the accounts of administration officials. The SUV did move toward the ICE agent as he stood in front of it. But the agent was able to move out of the way and fire at least two of three shots from the side of the vehicle as it veered past him, according to the analysis.
Good’s family and friends describe her as a devoted mother to her three children, an artist with a prizewinning talent for poetry who had weathered personal difficulties, including the death of her second husband, a military veteran who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.
She was “a devoted Christian who took part in youth mission trips to Northern Ireland when she was younger,” said her first husband, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concern for the safety of his daughter, 15, and son, 12. “She loved to sing and studied vocal performance in college.”
Good grew up in Colorado Springs. She attended Coronado High School, sang in the school’s show choir and participated in a school group called Community Crew dedicated to learning practical skills like cooking, according to the yearbook. When she graduated in 2006, Good won “Best Personality.”
“When I found out that I had won, I was like ‘this is pretty flippin’ sweet!’” she told yearbook staff.
Good attended Metropolitan State University of Denver briefly in 2014 and 2015. After she and her first husband divorced, he said Good married Timmy Macklin Jr., who served in the U.S. Air Force. In 2019, she began studying creative writing at Old Dominion University in Virginia.
“She was his heart,” her former brother-in-law Joseph Macklin, who lives near Knoxville, Tennessee, said of Good and his brother. He described her as “a great and loving mother.”
One of her professors, Kent Wascom, director of Old Dominion’s MFA and creative writing program, recalled her as a poet studying how to improve her fiction writing, first in a class and then an advanced workshop. Unlike some of her peers, Good never talked about politics, Wascom said, focusing instead on “realist fiction” about those very different from her, from an elderly woman to a veteran.
“She consistently sought to write outside of her experience,” he said. “She was a really warm presence but not a show-off. She never made a class about herself, even when her work was the focus of a workshop.”
By then, Good was older than many of her classmates, pregnant with her third child and working to pay for school (as a dental assistant and at a credit union, her first husband said). “My memory of Renee is how much she tried to connect with her peers and support them,” Wascom said. He recalled how Good later brought her newborn son to meet him.
By 2020, Good had won a prestigious prize for one of her poems, an honor Wascom said demonstrated her promise. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English that December.
In April 2021, Good met a professional photographer named Charles W. Winslow at an Old Dominion football game that he was covering. She wanted advice on how to incorporate photography into covers for book projects she had planned. He said she was a gifted student and accompanied him on many of his professional assignments. But he also remembered her kindness.
“As a friend she was kindhearted and always helping others in need,” Winslow said. “She didn’t care of race, creed, color. If she had $10 in her pocket, she would give a homeless person $9 that she passes on the street.”
In 2023, Timmy Macklin died at the age of 36, and Good became primarily a stay-at-home mom, her first husband said.
Joseph Macklin said Good made an effort to keep her son in touch with his family back in Tennessee: “She always brought him to see us. She was so kindhearted.”
After she met and married Rebecca Good, 40, the couple settled in Kansas City, Missouri, and crafted a quiet life.
As a gay couple living in a red state, they weren’t overtly political, at least among the residents of their quiet street in the Waldo neighborhood, their neighbor Jennifer Ferguson recalled Thursday. But after Donald Trump was reelected in 2024, the two broke their lease and told Ferguson they were moving to Canada because of the political situation.
“[Becca] said, ‘We’re getting out,’ ” Ferguson said. “‘We can go to Canada until we figure out what we are going to do.’”
The couple lived in the neighborhood for only a short time but made an impression on Ferguson, 41, an administrative assistant. Becca Good had sold a home improvement business before they moved in, so she mostly stayed home with their son, cooking and mowing the lawn. Renee Good told Ferguson she was studying for a master’s degree.
The two families exchanged Christmas treats and their kids played together, she said.
They were “just such nice people” and “great parents” to their son, then in preschool, Ferguson said. Both were attentive, quick to enforce rules or stop an activity — like splashing in a kiddie pool — when the little boy seemed overly tired. When they moved away, they gave Ferguson their lawn mower after hers had been stolen.
“We always talked about free stuff for the kids,” Ferguson said. “She asked about a free indoor playground, and I said, ‘Go to the McDonald’s up the street.” The couple also asked her opinion about nearby charter schools, because her son was about to start kindergarten.
“They rarely left the house,” Ferguson said, except to take the boy to school. “They were homebodies.”
They were also devotees of the WNBA and the KC Current, the local women’s pro soccer team. (A KC Current sticker was visible on Good’s Honda Pilot.)
The couple moved from Kansas City to Minneapolis in March of last year, her first husband said, adding that Becca Good was “getting support from friends and her and Renee’s family.”
Macklin, Good’s former brother-in-law, said Thursday that Good’s children “are hurting and wondering why this happened, especially the youngest.”
“We just buried his father three years ago in June and now he lost his mother,” Macklin said. “It is definitely a tragedy no kid should have to go through at such a young age. And to have to see it all over social media and television is sickening.”
He said that after the shooting, Good’s wife contacted his parents. “My heart really hurts for her. I’m praying for her,” he said. “She’s such a sweet and caring woman.”
Macklin, whose father is a Christian street preacher, struggled to make sense of Good’s death.
“I wish she would’ve minded her business and stayed out the way,” he said, but added, “I know families are being broken apart … and it’s heartbreaking, but now it’s our family.”
“She was a good mother and a good person, and she didn’t deserve this. Her [significant other] doesn’t deserve to be without her, her mom doesn’t deserve to be without her, and her kids don’t deserve to be without her,” he said. “It truly is a tragedy that not just our family is going through, but our nation.”
Hennessy-Fiske reported from Minneapolis, Gowen from Kansas City, Missouri, and Somasundaram from Washington. Jim Morrison in Norfolk and Karin Brulliard in Denver contributed to this report.
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