On the Murder of Renee Nicole Good

I watched another murder today.

I was scrolling on my social media, when I saw the video from Minneapolis: a black SUV that looks rather like my neighbor’s old Dodge, turning sharply to drive away from ICE agents on a snow-covered street. You could tell they were ICE agents by the mask. One of them tried to get in front of the car, after the driver turned. Then he aimed his gun at her side window, and shot her three times in the head. The car, now driverless, kept going aimlessly forward.

Later, there was video footage of those ICE agents denying a person who was trying to give her first aid. But she’s dead now, in any case.

I found out later that the murder victim was just a bit younger than me. She was a mother of a six-year-old child. Her name was Renee Nicole Good, and her child is an orphan now.

For the record, not that it matters to me in the least, she was a natural born American citizen, not an immigrant. Nobody is safe from our government right now. Not a single person, in America or out of it, is safe. Not in Venezuela or Greenland, and not in Minneapolis. No one is safe.

Quickly afterwards, the lies began. The president insisted that Ms. Good had run over that ICE officer, putting him in the hospital, but that absolutely did not happen. The videos are proof. The officer walked away after killing her in cold blood.  The police are saying there was no open investigation into her; she’s not a criminal. But government spokespeople are describing her as  terrorist.

You can see Trump’s remaining supporters making excuses.

They will believe whatever gaslighting Trump feeds to them, and they always will. It doesn’t matter how ludicrous the lies are. They will believe. They believed Trump when he said that he didn’t sexually abuse all of those women. They believed him when he said he’d build a wall and make Mexico pay for it. They believed his lies about the 2020 election. They believed that immigrants in Springfield were stealing and eating cats. Now they believe a mother in her thirties who drove away from masked men waving guns at her was a terrorist. Of course they do. They’ve made their choice, and we’re never going to get through to them.

I saw one Trump supporter fuming “she should have complied with the law.”

That was just what they said about six years ago, about another murder very close to that spot. I remember, after we all watched George Floyd slowly strangled to death under a police officer’s knee. People were saying “he should have complied with the law.”

What law?

I thought the purpose of the law was so that people wouldn’t be slaughtered in the street.

I thought that, in America, we were all supposed to be treated equally under the law. And I know we’ve never really lived up to that aspiration, but we’re currently in a situation where masked thugs who are not police officers, who don’t identify themselves, who kidnap citizens and shoot clergy, are murdering people on the street, and claiming those people are terrorists after the fact. Meanwhile, the president breaks law after law, and no one will hold him accountable.

Renee Nicole Good will never get a chance to prove she isn’t a terrorist in a court of law. And her son will never see her again.

My heart goes out to her, and to all who loved her.

I am so angry, exhausted, and ashamed, I don’t know what more I can say.