The recent death of Renee Nicole Good, a Minneapolis woman fatally shot by an ICE agent on Jan. 7, led hundreds of people to line both sides of South Brentwood Road, holding candles and demanding justice on a cool Friday night.
Many of those interviewed said their attendance at the vigil was motivated by a mix of sorrow and outrage at the death of Good, a wife and mother who was shot three times at point-blank range as she attempted to drive her SUV away from an ICE agent on Wednesday.
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A young woman who gave her name as Lilly stood near the corner of Brentwood and Eager roads, holding in her left hand a small sign that read, “ICE Out for Good” and in the other a battery-powered candle.
“The want for community during a trying time is what brought me out here,” Lilly said. “There is a mixture of shock along with … this gaping hole in your heart, an emptiness there.”
Kim Langhammer, 69, of Affton, stood a few feet away with her husband Tony, 74, and marveled at the events that brought the couple to Friday night’s vigil.
“We’re both retired,” Langhammer said. “And I never thought we’d be standing at the corner of Eager and Brentwood on a Friday night. But we have to do this because we have children and grandchildren.”
“It’s time for this country to wake up—Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, liberals,” Tony Langhammer said. “We have to work together for our own common good. And it’s time for people to wake up to that. And quit following [Trump] down this dark road.”
Many of those interviewed expressed rage at the ICE agent accused of shooting Good, an Iraq War veteran named Jonathan Ross, and at the agency that employs him, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which dispatched 2,000 agents last week to Minneapolis to conduct a crackdown on the Somali community there.
Several vigil attendees said they were also motivated by what they described as blatant lies being told about Good and the circumstances of her death by Kristi Noem, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security; by Vice President J.D. Vance; and by President Donald Trump, who ordered the immigration crackdown.
Vance, for instance, posted a 47-second-long video clip on X claiming that the ICE agent’s life was “endangered and he fired in self defense.” Vance also called Good “a deranged leftist.”
But cell phone videos, including one taken by Ross and obtained by multiple news outlets, suggest that Ross was never in the path of Good’s SUV and that she was attempting to drive away.
Jacob Frey, the Minneapolis mayor, told reporters on Friday that Ross walked away from the encounter “with a hop in his step from the incident. There’s another person that’s dead. He held on his cell phone. I think that speaks for itself.”
Both the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Minnesota law enforcement are investigating the shooting.
Chad Bernstein, one of the vigil’s organizers, attributed the large turnout Friday night to the fact the Good shooting “is really hitting a lot of people’s nerves, especially with the injustice of it all. It just seems uncalled for. It was an unnecessary use of force on someone who was dropping her kid off at school and was trying to get out of the way.”
Bernstein, the founder of Indivisible STL, called Good’s death “disheartening,” adding, “At the same time I see all these people coming together and standing with each other to memorialize this wonderful woman.”
Bernstein called this moment “the perfect opportunity for people to get active, to get involved, reaching out to communities, doing something…I think this is waking a lot of people up to take action and I think that is a beautiful, wonderful thing.”
