Renée Good’s biography defied easy political categorizations: she was raised Christian in one of the most conservative cities in the country and had started a new chapter of her life in one of its most liberal. She grew up in Colorado Springs, in a community that Becca Hainsworth, who was friends with Good as a teen-ager, recalled as “very military-heavy, very religious-heavy.” Both were enthusiastic members of a Presbyterian Church in America youth group called Village Seven; Good was an occasional soloist on the worship team. “She had one of the most beautiful singing voices I’ve ever heard in my life,” Hainsworth said.
Good married her high-school boyfriend, Justin Sheppard, in 2009; he joined the Air Force, and they had two kids before divorcing in 2015. In her thirties, while pregnant with her third child, Good studied English as an undergraduate at Old Dominion University. Her second husband and the child’s father, an Air Force veteran named Timmy Ray Macklin, Jr., died in 2023, a few months after the two broke up.
Renée and Becca Good started their relationship that year, and, according to public records, Renée took Becca’s last name in the fall. The couple moved to Minneapolis from Kansas City in 2025. “I guess they made the decision that if Trump won the election, they were going to get out before the inauguration,” a former neighbor told the Kansas City Star. They settled in a neighborhood with a supportive network of queer families. In one of the only public statements she has made since Renée’s killing, Becca Good spoke of “a strong shared sense here in Minneapolis that we were looking out for each other.” She continued, “Here, I had finally found peace and safe harbor. That has been taken from me forever.”
The agent who killed Good, Jonathan Ross, had worked for ICE since 2015, after previous stints in the National Guard and Border Patrol. In June, 2025, Ross was dragged by a vehicle driven by a Cuban immigrant whom he was attempting to arrest. (The driver, Roberto Munoz-Guatemala, was later convicted of a felony charge for assaulting a federal officer.) By midday on January 7th, members of the Trump Administration were arguing that Ross had acted in self-defense. Posting on Truth Social, the President said that Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE officer”; Vice-President J. D. Vance called her a “deranged leftist”; and Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy and Trump’s homeland-security adviser, described Good’s interaction with Ross before her death as “domestic terrorism.” (D.H.S. has continued to claim that Good “weaponized her vehicle” and attempted to hit Ross.)
“This is literally one of the most docile, kind, sweet, empathetic, shy people I know,” Hainsworth said. She told me that, after she’d found out that Good still had a pulse when the paramedics arrived, she watched the video of the shooting “five thousand times over.” “I know Renée,” she said. “I know her facial expressions. I know what her face looks like when she’s scared, and she’s scared.” I asked her why she had watched the video so many times, and she started to cry. “I just didn’t want her to be alone, you know?” she said.
In Minneapolis—which had exploded into destructive mass protests following the murder of George Floyd by a police officer named Derek Chauvin in 2020—officials scrambled to prepare for a potentially similar response to Good’s killing. Joe Thompson, then a senior official in the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s office and one of the city’s few intermediaries between the local and federal governments, requested that immigration agents pause enforcement activities while the shooting was investigated. For several hours, it appeared that they had. Then, in the early afternoon, Jacob Frey, the mayor of the city, gave a press conference during which he told ICE agents to “get the fuck out of Minneapolis.” Not long afterward, two dozen Border Patrol agents descended on Roosevelt High School as class was getting out, prompting a confrontation in which the agents deployed pepper spray and arrested four people, including a teacher. (A D.H.S. spokesperson said that the agents had been pursuing a U.S. citizen who was “actively trying to impede operations.”) Minneapolis public schools cancelled classes for the rest of the week.
