MINNEAPOLIS — Renée Good had “stopped to support our neighbors” when she was fatally shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer during an exchange of words on a residential street, according to a statement issued by her wife and video made public Friday.
“We had whistles. They had guns,” Rebecca Good said in the statement.
“We were raising our son to believe that no matter where you come from or what you look like, all of us deserve compassion and kindness,” Good said. “Renee lived this belief every day. She is pure love. She is pure joy.”
Renée Good, 37, was shotWednesday morning blocks from her home by an ICE officer, who federal officials say fired in self-defense. Details of the shooting, which was captured in videos widely disseminated online, are in dispute.
A recording released Friday by Alpha News appears to show the moments immediately before the shooting from the perspective of the ICE officer who shot Good. In the video, Renée Good can be heard speaking to an ICE officer through the open driver’s side window, saying, “That’s fine, dude, I’m not mad at you,” as the officer circles her vehicle while filming with a phone camera in his hand.
Rebecca Good, who was outside the car, speaks more aggressively, questioning the officer about face masks and license plates. At one point she says to the officer, “Go get yourself some lunch, big boy.” She soon reaches for the passenger door, as the officer tells Renée Good: “Get out of the car.”
The video abruptly ends seconds later as the car reverses and then moves forward. The video does not show whether the vehicle struck the officer. It records what sounds like shots being fired.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, told Fox News on Thursday that Renée 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.
Vice President JD Vance blamed Good for her own death, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem said Good’s actions amounted to “an act of domestic terrorism.”
Friends and family members painted a picture of a couple who came to Minneapolis almost a year ago looking for a place where they and their family could feel comfortable. They said Renée Good lived a quiet life not shaped by overt activism.
Good’s family members have said they do not believe she was tailing ICE officers. She had just dropped her son off at school before the shooting, they said. Her father, Tim Ganger, said in a brief interview Wednesday that she got “caught up in a bad situation.”
Rebecca Good’s statement Friday amounts to the first acknowledgment by her family that on Wednesday the couple were among the Minneapolis residents who have organized to monitor and protest immigration enforcement activity in their neighborhoods.
Other videos from witnesses that day show Good’s maroon Honda Pilot parked in the road as ICE vehicles approach. ICE officers then confront her, demanding that she get out of her car. A frame-by-frame analysis by The Post of the bystander footage, however, raises questions about administration officials’ accounts of the shooting. The SUV did move toward an ICE officer as he stood in front of it. But the officer 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. In her statement Friday, Rebecca Good recalled how Renée “sparkled.”
“You might think it was just my love talking but her family said the same thing. Renée was made of sunshine,” Rebecca Good said. “Renée 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.”
Her first husband also recalled Renée Good’s faith, noting that she had taken “part in youth mission trips to Northern Ireland” when she was younger. “She loved to sing and studied vocal performance in college,” he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of concern for the safety of his daughter, 15, and son, 12.
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 master’s of fine arts 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, such as an elderly woman and 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.”
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 Renée 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 age 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 peaceful 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. Renée 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 was 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 Kansas City 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.
“They wanted community,” said Kimmy Hull, a neighbor, who on Thursday stood on the porch of the couple’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.
Renée Good’s ex-husband said Becca Good was “getting support from friends and her and Renée’s family.”
Macklin, Good’s former brother-in-law, said 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, Karin Brulliard in Denver, and Maria Sacchetti and Razzan Nakhlawi in Washington contributed to this report.
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