After an immigration agent shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis on Wednesday morning, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and President Donald Trump portrayed that use of lethal force as clearly justified. Noem averred that the dead woman, Renee Nicole Good, was engaged in an “act of domestic terrorism” because she was trying to “run a law enforcement officer over.” Trump went even further, saying Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer.”
Bystander video of the incident immediately cast doubt on those accounts. Footage from various angles “appears to show the agent,” later identified as Jonathan Ross, “was not in the path of [Good’s] SUV when he fired three shots at close range,” The New York Times reported on Thursday. “The SUV did move toward the ICE agent as he stood in front of it,” The Washington Post noted. “But the agent was able to move out of the way and fire at least two of three shots from the side of the vehicle as it veered past him.”
The Post said the videos it analyzed “do not clearly show whether the agent is struck or how close the front of the vehicle comes to striking him.” On Friday, Vice President J.D. Vance posted cellphone video, apparently recorded by Ross himself, that suggests he was in fact hit by the front bumper before moving out of the way. But the evidence so far does not definitively resolve the issue of whether the shots Ross fired as the car moved away from him were legally justified, which hinges on whether he reasonably believed he was in danger at that point, even if that belief may have been mistaken.
On Thursday, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) said it had planned to “conduct a joint investigation” of the shooting “with the FBI.” But according to BCA Superintendent Drew Evans, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minneapolis “reversed course” on Wednesday afternoon, saying “the investigation would now be led solely by the FBI,” meaning “the BCA would no longer have access to the case materials, scene evidence or investigative interviews necessary to complete a thorough and independent investigation.”
Noem characterized the situation a bit differently. “They have not been cut out,” she said. “They don’t have any jurisdiction in this investigation.”
Hellbound and Down 