Factbox-Who was Renee Good, the woman killed by a US immigration agent in Minneapolis?

By Helen Coster

Jan 9 (Reuters) – Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three living in Minnesota, was shot dead in her car by a federal agent in Minneapolis on Wednesday, setting off protests and a sharp debate around the circumstances surrounding her killing.

Here is what we know about Good so far: 

A POET FROM COLORADO, STUDIED IN VIRGINIA

Good graduated from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, with an English degree in December 2020, according to a statement from the university.

She won an undergraduate poetry prize, according to a 2020 Facebook post by the school’s English Department, which described her as hailing from Colorado Springs, Colorado. “When she is not writing, reading, or talking about writing, she has movie marathons and makes messy art with her daughter and two sons,” the Facebook post said.

The Washington Post reported that Good’s daughter is 15 and her two sons are 12 and 6.

Colorado Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, issued a statement on Wednesday citing reports that she was from the Colorado Springs area and saying that his “thoughts are with Renee’s family, especially her young child, friends, and loved ones including those in Colorado.”

NEIGHBORHOOD PATROL OBSERVER

Good was active as a volunteer in a network of “neighborhood patrols” comprising hundreds of community members and organized by local activists to track, monitor and record ICE operations in Minneapolis, according to Michelle Gross, president of the Minnesota-based Community United Against Police Brutality and a paralegal for the National Lawyers Guild.

Gross, who told Reuters she had “first-hand” knowledge of Good’s participation in the ICE-“observer” patrols, said “that’s what she was doing” when she was confronted and shot by a federal agent.

Disputing assertions by federal officials that Good had been impeding the work of ICE agents, Gross said Good was trying to turn her car around and leave the scene when officers converged on her car and one of the agents opened fire.

Good’s wife, Becca Good, released a statement to Minnesota Public Radio on Friday that said on the day of the shooting, “we stopped to support our neighbors. We had whistles. They had guns.” 

People have blown whistles to signal that immigration agents are present, alerting undocumented people to flee and U.S. citizens to come to the scene to record arrests, give detainees legal information and discourage agents from lingering.

NEW TO MINNEAPOLIS

The biography for a private Instagram account that appeared to be Good’s described her as a “Poet and writer and wife and mom and shitty guitar strummer from Colorado; experiencing Minneapolis, MN.”

Becca Good said that she and Renee had chosen to move to Minneapolis to “make a better life for ourselves.”

“Renee was one of the kindest people I’ve ever known,” Renee Good’s mother, Donna Ganger, told the Minnesota Star Tribune. “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.”

(Reporting by Helen Coster in New York, Renee Hickman in Minneapolis, Steve Gorman in Los Angeles, Brad Brooks in Colorado and Maria Tsvetkova in New York, ; Editing by Donna Bryson, Diane Craft and Matthew Lewis )