Witness says victim was obviously scared before fatal ICE shooting

The woman who was shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer on Wednesday in Minneapolis appeared “obviously scared” and was trying to leave, a witness to the killing told News themezone, disputing government claims that the ICE agent acted in self-defense.

Emily Heller, 39, left her home around 9:30 a.m. after hearing whistles and honks from community members alerting her neighbors to the presence of ICE agents. Heller said he saw a woman, since identified as Renee Nicole Good, 37, in a vehicle blocking a convoy of six or seven ICE vehicles on a one-way street.

“ICE agents got out of their vehicles and were yelling at him to ‘move, move, move,’” Heller said. “At first she wouldn’t move, and then they went to her side of the car and tried to open the door, I guess to drag her out.”

“She was obviously scared — she was going to leave,” Heller said. “He backed up a little bit and then started moving forward. And as he started to move forward, one of the ICE agents stepped in front of his car, leaned over his hood, and then fired three or four shots, apparently directly into his face.”

Good, was “one of the kindest people I’ve ever met,” his mother, Donna Ganger, told the Minnesota Star Tribune. “She has taken care of people her entire life. She was loving, forgiving and caring. She was an incredible human being.”

Good had a young son, whose father died in 2023, according to the Star Tribune. “There’s no one else in his life,” Timmy Ray Macklin Sr., the boy’s grandfather, told the newspaper. “I’ll drive. I’ll fly. To come get my grandson.”

Other witness videos corroborate Heller’s account of the shooting. One, showing a clear view of the driver’s side of the vehicle, shows several armed officers approaching Good and attempting to open the driver’s door. The vehicle begins to leave when one of the agents fires multiple shots.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed that Good had committed an “act of domestic terrorism” against ICE agents and “attempted to run over and ram them with his vehicle.” Noem claimed the officer “acted quickly and defensively” to “protect himself and the people around him.”

“No way,” Heller said of DHS’s claim that the ICE agent acted in self-defense. The masked officer who shot Good “stepped in front of her,” Heller said.

Multiple incidents in President Donald Trump’s second term have shown federal agents lying about their actions in the course of immigration enforcement. In Chicago, for example, prosecutors finally dropped charges against a driver, shot by federal agents, who, according to DHS, “rammed” those agents with her vehicle. A federal judge had raised concerns about the possible destruction of evidence by an agent.

After Good was shot Wednesday in Minneapolis, the vehicle accelerated before crashing into a telephone pole and some cars, Heller said. It took emergency services about 15 minutes to arrive, Heller said. “She was just in her car, collapsed. There were no measures to save her life. There was nothing.”

Photo by Emily Heller

In a video Heller took and shared with News themezone, another bystander requests permission to check Good’s pulse.

“No! Back off! Now!” An unidentified voice answers.

“I’m a doctor,” the man says.

“I don’t care,” the voice responds.

A masked armed officer claims his own medics are on the way and asks the crowd to “just relax.”

“How can I relax? You just killed my fucking neighbor,” Heller can be heard in the video. “How the hell do you show up to work every day? How the fuck do you do this every day? You’re killing my neighbors; you’re stealing from my neighbors.”

Photo by Emily Heller

First responders were unable to get their vehicle to Good, Heller said. “They didn’t even have a stretcher. They just carried her out by her limbs. It’s like watching a sack of potatoes being carried down the street.”

ICE agents “are untrained, unprofessional and now they are murderers,” Heller said. “It seems like my neighborhood is being terrorized.”

Matt Shuham contributed to this report.