In her final moments, Renee Good was in the driver’s seat of her maroon Honda Pilot, wearing a light blue flannel over a red hoodie and speaking to an immigration agent who was recording her on his phone.
“That’s fine dude, I’m not mad,” she said as the agent circled her car, which was blocking part of a road. He was using a cellphone to record Ms. Good and her wife, Becca, who prodded him: “You wanna come at us?”
Moments later, Ms. Good was dead, shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, Jonathan Ross, on Wednesday morning. The agent was near the front of her car and fired his gun after she drove toward him and then turned to the right on a snowy Minneapolis street.
Amid ongoing debate about whether the shooting was justified and the overall tactics employed by the deportation operations of the Trump administration, thousands in Minneapolis and across the country have been mourning Ms. Good, 37, who had only recently moved to Minneapolis with her wife and 6-year-old son. This weekend, protests against ICE took place in cities and towns across the country.
When she was killed, Ms. Good and her wife had been participating in a protest in response to ICE agents who had been spotted in the neighborhood, one of whom had gotten a vehicle stuck in the snow.
Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, has said that Ms. Good was one of several “agitators” who were trying to block the agents from leaving. In a chat called Central Rapid Response on Signal, the encrypted app, Ms. Good’s wife was described by another member as a “helper” in Wednesday’s action.
Becca Good, in a statement to Minnesota Public Radio, described her wife as a Christian woman who believed in loving others, as well as finding and nurturing kindness in people. She was “made of sunshine,” Becca Good said.
A Mother and Poet
Ms. Good, a poet and a mother of three, was born in Colorado Springs, Colo., and grew up in the state. Later in life, she moved to Virginia and Kansas City, Mo., before arriving in Minneapolis sometime last year.
She attended Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., where she won a prize in 2020 for a poem entitled “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs” before graduating with an English degree in December of that year.
A former classmate remembered her camaraderie when they were both pregnant during the same semester in 2019.
“We encountered each other at a time in my life when I was walking on new, wobbly legs in very uncharted territory,” said the classmate, Marie Branch. She said Ms. Good’s excitement for her new son “was palpable,” and that Ms. Good, who had already had two children, had helped guide her.
“She mentored me when she herself was in the throes of it — she was a nurturer to her core,” Ms. Branch said.
A Move to Kansas City
Ms. Good moved to Kansas City, Mo., sometime after college, and, in October 2023, successfully sought to change her name to Renee N. Macklin Good, writing in a court petition that she wanted “to share a name with my partner.” (She was born Renee Nicole Ganger.) In the court filing, she said that her two older children lived in Colorado at the time.
In Kansas City, neighbors recalled a happy family of three — the Goods and their exuberant son, now 6 years old — who lived in a small home with a gay pride flag in a quiet neighborhood on the south side of the city.
One neighbor, Zach Howdeshell, 34, said he did not think of Ms. Good as an activist. He lamented that her son — whose father died two years ago — was now without her as well.
“Her little boy was just so sweet,” he said. “And that’s one of the things that breaks my heart the most.”
Jennifer Ferguson, who lived across the street, said she and her husband would sit outside drinking coffee in the morning, waiting for their daughter’s bus, and that they would hear laughter flow out of the kitchen window of the Goods’ home.
Even though they were only neighbors for about six months in 2024, Ms. Ferguson recalled seeing “a lot of tender moments” between the couple. When they parted, they would often hug in the driveway or at their doorstep. And they frequently drove their son to school together.
Their son would play with the Fergusons’ daughter, and, when they spotted each other from across the street in the mornings, he would shout, “Have a good day!” If there was time, he would rush over and give her a hug.
Ms. Ferguson said she and her husband felt lucky to have had such friendly neighbors who were part of a loving family. Becca would sometimes talk handyman projects or tools with Ms. Ferguson’s husband, and the two families swapped Christmas cookies that year. Becca even once asked if they wanted some red wine that the couple had used to cook with, since she and her wife did not drink.
The two families did not talk about politics, Ms. Ferguson said, though it seemed clear that the Goods did not like the political direction of the country. They had talked about moving to Canada, she said, and seemed to grow more serious about the prospect after President Trump was elected.
A Fresh Start in Minneapolis
The Goods left Kansas City at the end of December 2024, dropping off two final gifts at their neighbors’ house: a lawn mower and a deep-freezer that they were not taking with them. Ms. Ferguson said she figured they were moving to Canada.
It is not clear exactly when they arrived in Minneapolis, but they had begun sending their son to school there.
“Like people have done across place and time, we moved to make a better life for ourselves,” Becca Good said in her statement. “We chose Minnesota to make our home. Our whole extended road trip here, we held hands in the car while our son drew all over the windows to pass the time and the miles.”
The family lived in a house in Powderhorn, a diverse neighborhood that has gentrified in recent years but that is still known for its activist community, particularly after a police officer killed George Floyd nearby in 2020.
Becca Good said in her statement that “there was a strong shared sense here in Minneapolis that we were looking out for each other.”
On the day her wife was killed, Becca Good said they had been trying to support their neighbors. “We had whistles,” she wrote. “They had guns.”
Jesse Stensby, who lives near where Ms. Good was killed but did not know the couple, said that neighbors in the community had only grown closer since immigration authorities began targeting Minneapolis and St. Paul last month.
The day before Ms. Good was killed, he said, a “block captain” for a group that monitors ICE agents’ movements had knocked on doors in the neighborhood, handing out pamphlets and whistles to blow when agents were nearby.
“We all got to know each other very quickly,” he said. “We know how to organize and take care of each other.”
Christina Morales, Kurt Streeter and Jazmine Ulloa contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett and Georgia Gee and contributed research.
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs reports for The Times on national stories across the United States with a focus on criminal justice.
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