“They can’t kill all of us” — that was one of the signs I saw at the rally held this past Sunday in Northampton. It sure got my heart pounding, but strangely enough, I was lifted up by those words. After all, we were there to protest the shooting death of poet and young mother, Renee Nicole Good, by ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, in Minneapolis last week.
I’ve watched the video analysis created by the New York Times and I assume some of you have as well, and it’s clear that the woman had no intention of harming the agent. He was not hit or run over either. But, nonetheless, he shot her three times in the face. And why? Because he could. And he did. Ross was in no danger — she was not aiming a gun or a car at him. He could have put out a bulletin to have her brought in for questioning if he thought she broke the law in some way.
But no, he simply didn’t like what she did with her steering wheel. According to his own cell phone video, she was smiling and telling him that she’s not mad at him, and then just tried to drive away. Seconds later she was dead. The recurrent guy immediately began lying about what happened and who Renee was. Within hours he posted to his social media platform that Renee “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer.” The recurrent guy’s associates, like Kristi Noem, Department of Homeland Security Secretary, jumped right on the same bandwagon, saying the agent was run over by Renee and that she was a domestic terrorist. But clearly from the video evidence, there’s no truth to any of that.
And, then there’s the vice president, JD Vance, who went before a press conference the next day to blame Renee Good for her own death, saying she was “brainwashed,” suggesting without evidence that she was tied to a “broader, left-wing network.”
So, with no investigation into the tragic death of Renee Good even yet begun, the people who run our government began making statements about the details and causes of the incident as if they knew the facts, which, of course, they could not. This is not how our legal system works, at least not how it used to work. The president and his appointees would have expressed sadness and then waited for a full and thorough investigation before making any comments at all. Now they have interfered with and distorted the course of justice.
The FBI has now cut the state of Minnesota and city of Minneapolis out of participating in the investigation at all. How are we to trust what the results will be of a federally run investigation when they obviously have already decided what the outcome should be.
My guess is that there will be no charges filed against Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent, and he will walk away free to shoot another innocent citizen who still thinks they have protections under our Constitution from a rogue militia backed by the full force of the federal government.
We just passed the fifth anniversary of the January 6th attack on our Capitol, and the recurrent guy and his hench-people were celebrating the now-pardoned violent insurrectionists. We saw with our own eyes, live on TV, those insurrectionists beat and bludgeon police officers who were defending our elected officials. I guess beating up police is just fine when you like the attackers, but don’t let unarmed protesters dare come too close to an ICE agent?
One more piece of painful irony for you — the recurrent guy has been threatening to attack Iran because the Iranian government is cracking down on citizen demonstrations there. He has said this in the context of Iranian protesters being killed by the police. So, he will bomb Iran because they are doing what he is supporting right here — the killing of non-violent protesters?
Which brings me back to the very well attended rally on Sunday and that sign I mentioned above. I’d like to believe that they can’t kill us all, but what’s been evident is that we are in danger when we exercise our First Amendment rights to free speech and protest. People are being shot and killed. Unexpectedly I was filled with courage when I saw that sign because I realized that the more of us who show up at these protests, the less likely it is that they can kill us all. There will just be too many of us.
Renee Nicole Good, may your memory be for a blessing.
Karen Gardner of Haydenville can be reached at opinion@gazettenet.com.