Much of Renee Good’s family has not watched the widely circulated video of an ICE agent fatally shooting the Minneapolis mother-of-three last month.
“I have not, I can’t bring myself to do that,” Brent Ganger, Good’s brother, told NBC News in an interview aired Friday.
“I think we’ve all intentionally just let that go,” her father, Tim Ganger, added.
Donna Ganger, Good’s mother, said the only part of the clip she has watched is when Renee Good told ICE agent Jonathan Ross, “I’m not mad at you” moments before he opened fire.
“That was so Renee,” Ganger said in the interview.
Good was killed on January 7. She had been observing immigration operations from her SUV and was in the middle of a group of officers when she was ordered to get out of the car. Good seems to turn the vehicle to begin driving away as officers including Ross stood nearby, and the agent soon fired multiple shots into the SUV.
The family described a sense of alienation since Good’s death, both from the partisan narratives about her death that spread, as well as from the Trump administration, which quickly labeled Good a wannabe “domestic terrorist“ who sought to use her car as a weapon.
“I feel like we’re the ones who know Renee,” brother Luke Ganger told NBC. “No one else knows Renee. I think at least for me, the default thing when you hear any of the noise is it’s just, I don’t know, to a certain degree it’s easy to tune out because it’s just, no one knew her.”
The family said the Trump administration has not been in touch with them since the shooting.
“There’s a reason that we hired our own investigators — to make sure that the truth is transparent and available, to make sure that this is really taken seriously and to make sure that we know what occurred,” Brent Ganger said in the NBC interview.
The family’s claims follow other irregularities in the investigation into Good’s death.
Federal officials did not launch a civil rights investigation into the shooting, instead reportedly pushing to investigate Good’s partner and her ties to local activist groups.
Federal prosecutors were reportedly preparing to search Good’s vehicle shortly after the shooting as part of a joint investigation with state officials but were ordered by senior FBI leadership to call off the effort.
State police in Minnesota say they’ve been blocked from accessing the full evidence in the shooting and have bowed out of doing a local probe as a result.
Numerous federal prosecutors in Minnesota resigned from a local U.S. Attorney’s Office this year, reportedly over the Trump administration’s handling of the Good investigation.
Last month, Good’s family hired a team of lawyers which represented the family of George Floyd, a Black man whose murder in 2020 by Minneapolis police set off nationwide protests.
Good was shot at least three times during her encounter with Ross, an independent autopsy commissioned by her family found.
The Department of Homeland Security continues to investigate the shooting.
In the wake of Good’s killing and after federal agents shot dead another American in Minneapolis, Alex Pretti, the Trump administration began drawing down the military-style immigration crackdown that had been active in the Twin Cities since late last year.
