Rashomon in Minneapolis

Three days ago (January 7), Renee Good, a citizen, was shot and killed by Jonathan Ross, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent. She was 37 years old and a mother of three.

Multiple videos surfaced, showing the tragedy from different angles, but there was no consensus on why Good died. For many on the left, it was cold-blooded murder by an ICE agent. For others, the agent was acting in self-defense as he faced Good’s dangerously accelerating car.

Each side was amazed the other couldn’t see what was so obvious in each video. It was the blue-and-black dress controversy, but with much higher stakes. Rashomon in the real world.¹

So what really went down?

That Wednesday morning, Good sat in her parked maroon Honda Pilot, partially blocking traffic on Portland Avenue. She was cheerfully bouncing to the noise of the honking horns and protesters blowing whistles. Her wife was outside the car. They thought ICE rounding up illegal immigrants was wrong and were there to oppose it. Her wife later said, “We had whistles, they had guns.”

Although Good’s car was parked at a diagonal, it was still possible to pass her, and some cars were doing so. A gaggle of unmarked ICE vehicles was lined up nearby. One agent, later identified as Jonathan Ross, began circling her car, counter-clockwise, filming with a cell phone camera.

Ross’s 47-second video starts on the right side of Good’s Honda as he steps out of his own vehicle. He approaches, holding his cell phone and filming as he walks. There is a dog looking out the right rear window of Good’s Honda.²

Good leans out her window as Ross approaches, still with a half smile. She says, “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.” Ross says nothing, just keeps circling.

This moment seems important. If Ross is supposed to be assessing a threat, Good seems to present as inoffensive a presence as can be imagined. She reassures him that she’s not mad. Maybe she’s trying to placate him. In my mind, this should make it clear to Ross that Good, while possibly very annoying and interfering with his work, is not an active threat. Not everyone sees it that way, of course.

Ross continues around the car, filming its license plate.

Rebecca Good, Renee’s wife, standing at the back of the car, starts smack-talking Ross: “We don’t change our plates every morning… It’ll be the same plate when you come talk to us again.” Rebecca is filming Ross as he films her and the car.³

Rebecca seems more aggressive than Renee.

Once he’s completely circled the car, Ross switches his phone from his right to his left hand.

Next, we hear two ICE agents approaching from the other (driver’s) side of the Honda. They are shouting at her.

Out of the car. Out of the car. Get out of the fucking car.

Rebecca Good reaches to get into the car, but can’t seem to open the right-side door. As Ross starts to pass in front of the car, we can see Renee Good turn towards her driver’s side window, looking at the agents (one of whom is trying to open her door). Her front wheel is clearly turned left.

As Ross walks in front of her car, Good does a slight reverse, preparing to change direction. You can see her turning her tires to the left. Because Ross is walking forward and Good is reversing slightly, Ross traverses more rapidly across the front of the Honda. Rebecca is now crying at her, “Drive, baby, drive!”

What is Good’s goal at this point? To me, it seems she’s preparing to turn right and (foolishly) try to get away from the ICE agents. Not everyone agrees.

The wildest accusation, popular on Twitter, is that this smiling mom of three has suddenly become eager to kill, and she’s turning her wheels to run down Ross. Remember, Ross has already passed in front of her car once previously. She could have charged him then! Why wait?

Good has no violent history; she’s done nothing violent up to this moment in the confrontation. She’s even told Ross, “I’m not mad at you,” and yet we’re supposed to believe that she’s suddenly become a ruthless killer.

And that her wife is essentially telling her, “Kill that guy, kill him now. And then spend the rest of your life in prison!”⁴

Madness.

But obviously, some people, like AJ, are quite mad.

Let’s look at more camera angles.

One day after the shooting, the New York Times put together a video report based on three cell phone videos (but not Ross’s cell phone video, which came out later).

In the first part of the Times video, at real speed, you can see ICE officers approaching the Honda while Ross circles around the front. One officer has their hand on the door handle. This is seconds before Ross is going to draw and shoot Good.

At the 9-second mark, the Honda’s wheel has turned towards Ross, and he has begun to draw his gun.

But the tire keeps on turning before we hear any shot. At the 10-second mark, it is already turning away from Ross, so the car can go down Portland Avenue. At the end of that 10th second in the Times video, Good has turned the wheel further, and the car is accelerating, already passing Ross. She was not aiming at him. It is only then that we hear the first shot.

Ross fires three shots. The first goes through the front windshield on its right side. It seems it was fired over the hood of the car from the side. The other two shots were aimed at the car’s side, although at this time, it’s not clear what they struck or which bullet killed Good.

Scrolling further along the Times video makes things clearer. From another angle, you see the first shot again at the 2:12 mark. Good’s front tire is already turned away from Ross.

At the 2:20 mark, the video freezes to show Ross’s feet, out of the Honda's path. You can see the cloud of smoke from that first shot.

Why do people think Good was aiming at Ross? Well, probably most of them haven't bothered to watch the New York Times video (though you can find it for free on Twitter). They’ve perhaps seen Ross’s cell phone video or a freeze frame of the supposedly murderous Good, smiling as she tries to kill Ross. That and their political priors are enough to convince far too many people.

Confirmation bias is what these partisan times are about. It convinces MAGA supporters that Good wanted to kill, just as it wrongly convinced liberals that Kyle Rittenhouse had not been acting in self-defense back in 2020.⁵ All too often, we see what we want to believe. We can even watch the same videos and come away with different conclusions.

Perhaps I have deluded myself, but I remain sure that Good was not aiming at Ross. But did she hit him anyway? That is less clear.

Some viewers of Ross’s cell phone video are sure it shows him being hit, but in the chaos of him dropping his left hand (holding the phone) and raising his right (to fire the gun), I can’t tell. There is also a grainy video from a worse angle that some claim shows Ross being hit.

The Times took that grainy video and time-synced it with another and argued that it did not show him being hit. This image is at the 2:52 mark of the Times video.

To me, it looks like he lurches back in this moment. Given where his feet are, it seems possible that the car brushed against his torso, or even just pushed on his left hand as he held the phone.

But whatever causes his backward movement, he remains on his feet and firing. He is not staggering or spinning. If he was hit, he wasn’t hit very hard, and not from the front of the Honda.

Now, about motivations.

Good’s original motivation seems clear. She was there to make it harder for ICE vehicles to get where they were going.⁶ This may have given ICE grounds to arrest her. Her mood seemed cheerful (bouncing in her car before ICE shows up), and her smile friendly, but it’s possible that I’m wrong and she was actually being smug and condescending, as some have suggested.

Murderous? I simply can’t see it, not for a second. And remember, middle-aged ladies are about the least murderous demographic. I know this doesn’t mean they can’t kill, but men and women are very different. Despite what some liberals claim, biology matters. Women are less murdery!

But even though I’m pretty sure Good was not murderous, she was being sadly foolish.

Protesting is good! It’s patriotic! Shout at or film ICE! No special training is needed. But once you start organizing blockades, using large, dangerous vehicles, you are entering risky territory.

Think about the Civil Rights protests. The SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) and SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) worked hard to train their activists in the proper way to protest. They knew that their strength was in appearing more decent, more civilized than their opponents. They avoided anything that smelled of violence.

A car is a deadly weapon. Driving it in a peaceful protest is dumb.

Renee Good’s decision to suddenly flee, and Rebecca Good encouraging her (“Drive baby”), was foolish. Any good defense attorney will tell you never to run away. Even if the cops are in the wrong, when they tell you to get out of the car, you get out of the car. That doesn’t mean Good deserved to die, but it does mean she was making bad choices.

And what about the ICE agents? They seem less professional than the protesters, and with far less excuse. They started the encounter seeming pissed off, especially the two who approached Good and told her to “Get out of the fucking car.” I imagine they were angry. They had been held up by this bouncy lady, and they wanted to arrest her and get her out of their way so they could do their job. I understand that, but it does not seem an ideal attitude for law enforcement.

Atlanta defense attorney Andrew Fleishman made the point that experienced police prefer a low-key approach because it tends to be far more effective.

Remember, Good was sitting calmly in her car the first time Ross walked in front of her. She didn’t start trying to move her car until after two ICE officers barged up, yelling at her and trying to grab the handle of her door. I can easily imagine a quieter approach getting entirely different results.

And now, what about Jonathan Ross?

I’ll lay my cards on the table: I think he was in the wrong.

Experienced law enforcement professionals have noted that Ross twice made the mistake of walking in front of the car. Smart officers don’t put themselves in a position to get run over.

Second, he seemed a bit too ready for trouble, given who he was facing. His decision to switch his phone from his right to his left hand after he circled the car the first time seems deliberately designed to free his gun hand, but Good had shown no violent behavior up to that point.

Third, a reverse before turning is an entirely normal maneuver. Ross must have seen it ten thousand times. He shouldn’t have been surprised or assumed Good had hostile intent, especially because he could see her turning the wheel to the right. In this shot from a 3-second video posted by Joe Scarborough, you can see her right hand at the 12 o’clock position as she continues to turn the steering wheel.

Some observers have made much of the fact that the Honda’s wheels briefly spun while she was turning her wheel, but it was only for a fraction of a second before the car caught traction, and, as I pointed out above, the tire turned AWAY from Ross.

Good was not a threat.

She may have grazed him with the right side of her car as she pulled out, pushing him a little, but she was not heading directly towards him. If she were, Ross would not have ended up to the side of the car.

But that does not mean that Ross committed cold-blooded murder.

It was a tense situation. Just because women rarely murder doesn’t mean they never do. The woman, whom he didn’t know, was in a car, a dangerous weapon. While I saw friendliness in her face, he may have seen a sneer.

And then the car starts to move. He can hear the wheels spinning. It’s only for an instant, but time can be strange in those moments. His brain may have told him she was about to charge into him. At one point, her wheels were, briefly, pointed in his direction.

I think his best, obvious choice was to step aside and let her car pass him.

Critically, even if he thinks she’s trying to kill him, he has a far better chance of escaping death by moving than by firing his gun. If he shoots, he has to hit her, and that hit has to stop her. As we see, it doesn’t. Her car keeps moving until it crashes into another car down the street. His bullets did not stop her car.

And why fire those two follow-up shots? The car was passing him already. The best defense is that he was on automatic at that point, but if he is prosecuted, those last two shots are probably going to be an issue.

Of course, arguing that he made the wrong choice is easy for me to say. I’m not facing a 4,000-pound deadly weapon with only an instant to make the right choice. I can judge him for being in front of the car, and judge him for seeming too ready to draw, and firing those last two shots, but I get to do that from the safety of my own warm apartment.

One thing that gives me pause is that at the end of his cell phone video, someone can be heard saying “fucking bitch.” I assume that’s Ross, although I can’t know for sure. That doesn’t look good, if it’s him.

In the end, this is a tragedy of bad choices. Two women thought they were doing some good by stopping ICE from doing what they considered evil, but chose a poor method. They faced loud, aggressive ICE agents; they panicked; one ICE agent pulled his gun; shots were fired; and three children will never hear from their mother again.

And don’t forget where the bad choices began. President Donald Trump has ordered ICE to carry out a heavy-handed campaign of rounding up illegal immigrants. Kristi Noem has supervised a paramilitary group that goes around masked and acts like a law unto itself. This kind of gung-ho, confrontational behavior was inevitably going to result in tragedy. The Wall Street Journal has reported that previous encounters have led to other shootings and deaths (Videos Show How ICE Vehicle Stops Can Escalate to Shootings). The Goods and the ICE agents made bad choices, but ultimate responsibility rests on Trump’s shoulders.

1. Rashomon (1950) was a film directed by Akira Kurosawa that depicted a murder described by four different narrators. It gave birth to the concept of “the Rashomon effect,” highlighting the unreliability of witnesses.

2. The dog survived the event.

3. In the end, everyone will be filming everyone else as we slouch towards Armageddon.

4. Why did Rebecca tell her to “drive”? More foolishness. I think she wanted her wife to get away. She wasn’t thinking clearly. But encourage her to murder an ICE agent? No.

5. In 2020, Kyle Rittenhouse was charged with killing two men, Anthony Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum. I watched a LOT of Rittenhouse videos, and was completely convinced that he was a young idiot who got caught up in a messy situation and then was attacked by an angry mob. Saying this to my left-wing friends got me a lot of grief! Rittenhouse was found “not guilty.”

6. Some early comments suggested that she had just been in the neighborhood after dropping her child off at school, but that was completely implausible from the start. Almost nobody ends up parked horizontally in the street by accident! Her wife’s later statement made it clear that they were there as activists.