Ah, the new year! What a good time to change bad habits in one’s life. A time in which people make ‘new-year’s resolutions’, or perhaps more accurately, what they make as self-promises are actually prophecies which most hope will be fulfilled. At the turn of the year, many swear to get in shape, but empty gyms perhaps suggest that there is a hope that the prophecies would be fulfilled by karma itself, owed from everything that people had to put up with last year.

Because magic-karma doesn’t exist – this new years – our American gym remains empty. Though I think the word ‘tragedy’ should have fit the following event, that word has been diluted by media overuse.

What happened was avoidable. The escalation was compounded by what was essentially overzealous sports dads in body armor carrying guns, and then it was handled in the same indifferent way by ICE as if it were a rerun of a boring episode of Friends.

U.S.-born citizen Renee Nicole Good was shot in the face and killed by ICE in Minnesota. There are multiple videos online of the event, taken from different angles. Renee Good was stopped in the middle of a road – People Magazine reported that her ex-husband said she was returning home from dropping her kids off. It is also confirmed by the locals that she lived just a few blocks from the scene. In one of the longer-shot videos, it seems that many vehicles were traveling towards Renee on a narrow residential street, on which she would not be able to pass.

This is my wager, but likely she was heading home when she stopped, seeing ICE vehicles and others filling the road ahead of her, and tried to turn around. The videos also show Renee backing up to let the vehicles pass in front of her, which is when two ICE officers approached her vehicle. NPR reports that in videos, Renee is given conflicting orders by ICE agents: to both move her vehicle and get out of the way, while also being ordered to get out of her car.

I do not think I have ever been in that situation: to be given an order by one man with a gun, that I should leave right away, while another man orders me to stay and remain in the dangerous situation. Fight or flight are the natural reactions for all animals, and Renee chose to listen and flee.

There was an agent in front of her car, and she turned her wheels to avoid him while the agent ordering her out of her car reached into her driver’s window. The agent in front of her car in one video angle seems to get bumped, but in two other angles, does not seem to be touched at all.

The agent swung himself to the side, avoiding Renee’s vehicle and then shot through the windshield, then through the open driver’s window. Renee’s car crashes into other cars down the road, and a bystander immediately takes off after, running down the road towards the accident. ICE, however, responds by ambling down the road slowly, and the agent who killed Renee jumps in his SUV and drives away in the opposite direction.

A man standing on the side of the road is blocked by an ICE agent with an assault rifle. The man says, “I am a physician.” The ICE agent responds: “I don't care." The doctor says, "Can I check her pulse?” And, ICE, ever heroic, replies in the same disinterested way which breaks a heart: “No."

The doctor exclaimed, "You killed my neighbor!”

An ICE agent in the video replied, “Relax."

Man. Ain’t that some shit?

A simple, casual instruction by ICE to have her continue to turn her vehicle away (she was already politely letting other cars pass) could have avoided a death and a tragedy. Then, two men with guns and body armor move towards her vehicle, and ICE agents shout two entirely conflicting commands, immediately and directly countermanding each other as if they were drill sergeants trying to get a recruit to break:

“Flee!” and “stay!"

And she chooses to flee and is not just shot in the face at point-blank range, but then denied immediate medical service by a doctor who was present and offering his potentially life-saving skills, all the while agents casually walked after the crashed vehicle, and the shooter himself fled the scene. On the field of battle, it is a war crime to not provide life-saving aid if you are safe and capable of it, yet a U.S. citizen is denied immediate aid after she was following one of the orders given to her?

To be clear for supporters of the agents’ actions: in a review of force by the US Customs and Border Patrol, they write that:

“It is suspected that in many vehicle shooting cases, the subject driver was attempting to flee from the agents who intentionally put themselves into the exit path of the vehicle, thereby exposing themselves to additional risk and creating justification for the use of deadly force. The cases suggest that some of the shots at suspect vehicles are taken out of frustration when agents who are on foot have no other way of detaining suspects who are fleeing in a vehicle. There is little doubt that the safest course for an agent faced with an oncoming vehicle is to get out of the way of the vehicle. CBP policy should be “Agents shall not discharge their firearms at or from a moving vehicle unless deadly physical force is being used against the police officer or another person present, by means other than a moving vehicle.”

Ms. Renee Good’s first husband passed, leaving her a widow, and she later remarried and divorced. A mother of three children, PBS reports that her ex-husband said that Renee was a devout Christian who went on mission trips to other countries when she was young. Her son from her first marriage has now lost both of his parents. The Minnesota Star Tribune reported that when the father of Renee’s late husband, and the grandfather to her first son, was told of her death, he said,

“There’s nobody else in his life. I’ll drive. I’ll fly. To come and get my grandchild.”

Austin Petak is an aspiring novelist and freelance journalist who loves seeking stories and the quiet passions of the soul. If you are interested in reaching out to him to cover a story, you may find him at austinpetak@gmail.com.

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