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The Killing of Renee Good: How a Tactical Failure Led to a Fatal Shooting at 34th & Portland · The PhilStockWorld Investing Podcast

• 0:00
  Penny: So let's set the scene. It's 01/07/2026. A snowy residential neighborhood in South Minneapolis.
• 0:07
  Roy: And in just a matter of moments, an already tense situation just it explodes.
• 0:13
  Penny: Right. A federal agent fatally shoots a US citizen, a mother, and the incident immediately becomes this flashpoint.
• 0:21
  Roy: Yeah. A flashpoint that creates two completely different totally irreconcilable versions of reality almost overnight.
• 0:27
  Penny: And that's really the core of what we need to unpack.
• 0:30
  Roy: Exactly. On one side you have the official White House narrative, DHS is backing it up and they're calling it, a clear case of domestic terrorism.
• 0:38
  Penny: And self defense.
• 0:39
  Roy: And self defense. Then on the other side, you've got local officials, the governor, eyewitnesses, and they're using words like murder and propaganda.
• 0:47
  Penny: So that's the conflict we're diving into. Our goal here is to cut through all that noise, look at the facts, and really try to understand where the system failed.
• 0:54
  Roy: It failed spectacularly. To get why, you really have to go back a week before the shooting to the launch of this thing called Operation Metro Search.
• 1:01
  Penny: This wasn't just routine, I mean, the scale of it is critical to understand the environment these agents were in.
• 1:07
  Roy: It's everything. The Department of Homeland Security itself called it the largest immigration enforcement operation ever carried out in the region.
• 1:15
  Penny: Ever. And the numbers, they're just staggering. We're talking about roughly 2,000 federal agents dropped into the Twin Cities.
• 1:21
  Roy: For a thirty day operation. And it's a mix of forces, which is key. You've got 1,500 ERO officers. They're the ones who do arrests, deportations.
• 1:30
  Penny: Right. The enforcement arm.
• 1:32
  Roy: And then another 600 HSI agents who are usually focused on more complex stuff like fraud investigations.
• 1:38
  Penny: So that combination already signals this isn't about targeted arrests, this is a sweep.
• 1:43
  Roy: It's a sweep. And the political motivation behind it is, well, it's impossible to ignore. The operation was aimed squarely at Minneapolis's large Somali community.
• 1:52
  Penny: And the rhetoric from the top was incredibly charged. You had president Trump on record calling Somali refugees garbage, calling the state a hellhole.
• 2:02
  Roy: And he'd already ordered a reexamination of green cards from Somalia among other countries, so the groundwork was laid.
• 2:09
  Penny: They were trying to link this massive operation to fraud investigations, right?
• 2:13
  Roy: Right.
• 2:13
  Penny: Specifically, the Feeding Our Future scandal.
• 2:16
  Roy: Exactly. The strategy was to paint the entire community as this hub of fraud to justify the huge deployment. But the key thing our sources point out is that federal prosecutors had very little actual evidence connecting those fraud cases to any wider immigration crime, let alone terrorism.
• 2:34
  Penny: So it was about intimidation?
• 2:35
  Roy: It was political intimidation. The atmosphere in the city was already a powder keg.
• 2:39
  Penny: Long before the shooting, I mean, Governor Tim Walz had already been sounding the alarm accusing federal agents of unlawful practices.
• 2:47
  Roy: Yeah, there were incidents. Agents shutting down East African restaurants just to check IDs, using pepper spray on whistleblowers.
• 2:54
  Penny: Even detaining U. S. Citizens during these sweeps.
• 2:56
  Roy: So the community was on edge and they were organized. This is fascinating. They had online networks to track federal vehicles.
• 3:03
  Penny: And the whistle?
• 3:03
  Roy: Yeah, coordinated whistle network to sound the alarm when agents were spotted in a neighborhood. Plus, you had organized civilian observers whose entire job was just to document what these agents were doing.
• 3:15
  Penny: So you have 2,000 armed agents deployed into a city that is this tense, this organized for resistance. An incident didn't just feel possible.
• 3:23
  Roy: It felt almost inevitable, calculated even.
• 3:26
  Penny: Which brings us to the incident itself. And the spark for all this tragedy was something almost absurdly mundane.
• 3:34
  Roy: A car got stuck in the snow.
• 3:36
  Penny: A federal law enforcement vehicle lodged in the snow on Portland Avenue.
• 3:40
  Roy: And that location, I mean, it's less than a mile from where George Floyd was killed. The history there is just baked into the pavement.
• 3:46
  Penny: So into this scene drives the victim, Renee Nicole Good.
• 3:49
  Roy: And it's important to know who she was. She's 37, a US citizen, a mother of three, a poet, a writer.
• 3:56
  Penny: Crucially, she was not the target of any immigration sweep. City officials later confirmed she was acting as a legal observer.
• 4:02
  Roy: She just dropped off her six year old son, she's driving home with her partner, and they come upon this scene with the stuck federal vehicle.
• 4:08
  Penny: And this is where the two realities just completely diverge.
• 4:12
  Roy: Completely. According to witnesses and the bystander video, Good's car, a maroon Honda pilot is stopped sideways kind of blocking one lane.
• 4:20
  Penny: And agents in tactical gear immediately approach the car shouting.
• 4:24
  Roy: Right shouting get out of the car! But the scene is pure chaos Witnesses reported hearing conflicting orders.
• 4:30
  Penny: This part is so important.
• 4:32
  Roy: It's critical. One agent is reportedly waving her on telling her to drive away to clear the traffic. At the same time another agent is at her door yelling at her to get out trying to open it.
• 4:43
  Penny: So she's getting two opposite commands from armed federal agents.
• 4:46
  Roy: Imagine the confusion, the fear, the car then backs up a little and then starts to move forward slowly as if to drive away.
• 4:54
  Penny: And the agent standing right in front of her vehicle
• 5:01
  Roy: car then accelerates, out of control, crashes into some parked cars. Renee Nicole Goode was killed instantly. Now hold that sequence in your mind. The video, the witness accounts. Because the federal government's response was immediate and a total counter narrative.
• 5:17
  Penny: Within hours, Homeland Security Secretary Kristine Noem is on the record calling it an act of domestic terrorism.
• 5:23
  Roy: Her spokesperson doubles down. They release a statement saying Good Good weaponized her vehicle attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them.
• 5:34
  Penny: A complete reversal of what witnesses saw and it goes all the way to the top.
• 5:38
  Roy: Oh yeah, President Trump posts that Goode violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the IC officer. He even attacks her partner who was screaming and recording, calling him a professional agitator.
• 5:49
  Penny: So the federal response wasn't just to defend the agent, it was to vilify the victim and create a justification for deadly force no matter what the video showed.
• 5:57
  Roy: Which brings us to accountability or really the complete failure of it.
• 6:01
  Penny: The video was the Achilles' heel for their story from the start.
• 6:04
  Roy: Absolutely. Yeah. Governor Walz, Mayor Frey, they both came out publicly and said the video flat out contradicts the claim that the officer was run over.
• 6:11
  Penny: The official DHS line was that the agent was hit by the vehicle then treated and released.
• 6:18
  Roy: But multiple reports from people on the scene said there was no visible sign of injury to the officer. You'd think if someone was violently run over, there'd be some pretty clear evidence of that.
• 6:28
  Penny: And beyond just the injuries, what about protocol? The agent's actions themselves.
• 6:32
  Roy: Right. DHS policy is clear. You don't use deadly force on a fleeing subject. And there are reports that agents are trained not to stand in front of a moving vehicle for this exact reason.
• 6:44
  Penny: Because it creates a pretext for using deadly force. You put yourself in danger then claim you had to shoot your way
• 6:50
  Roy: out. Exactly, so the agent's decision to move into the path of that car and then fire, that demands serious scrutiny.
• 6:58
  Penny: But that scrutiny never happened, at least not from an independent body. And this for me is the deepest point of systemic failure.
• 7:05
  Roy: This is the collapse. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, the BCA, they're the state agency that investigates all police killings.
• 7:12
  Penny: They were supposed to be on the case, a joint investigation.
• 7:14
  Roy: Right, and then they were forced to withdraw. Forced out? How? Why? The FBI took over as the sole investigating body and simply blocked the BCA's access to everything.
• 7:27
  Penny: Everything.
• 7:28
  Roy: Everything. The BCA confirmed it, the FBI refused to share case materials, scene evidence or investigative interviews. They were locked out.
• 7:36
  Penny: So the state of Minnesota loses jurisdiction over a killing on its own soil of its own citizen by a federal agent.
• 7:43
  Roy: It guarantees the only investigation is an internal one, the federal government investigating itself.
• 7:48
  Penny: It's the definition of
• 8:03
  Roy: Yeah, she tried to justify his state of mind. She claimed that same officer had been, rammed and dragged by a protester back in June.
• 8:10
  Penny: The implication being his past trauma justified the shooting.
• 8:14
  Roy: Regardless of the evidence, it was a clear attempt to shift the narrative away from his actions on that day.
• 8:19
  Penny: And the reaction from local leaders was just volcanic. This is where you see the trust just evaporate completely.
• 8:26
  Roy: Mayor Jacob Freed didn't mince words. He called the self defense story 'bowls' and demanded that ICE get the F out of Minneapolis.
• 8:35
  Penny: And Governor Walls, usually pretty measured, told the public directly, don't believe this propaganda machine.
• 8:41
  Roy: I mean think about that, that's not just a political disagreement. A governor is openly accusing the federal government of covering up a murder with propaganda.
• 8:50
  Penny: The political fallout was immediate. Rep. Robin Kelly from Illinois announced she was filing articles of impeachment against Secretary
• 8:58
  Roy: Not against the agent, but against Noam for obstruction of justice, violation of public trust.
• 9:03
  Penny: It instantly went from a local tragedy to this huge national constitutional crisis over federal power.
• 9:08
  Roy: And amid all that politics, the human impact on the community was just devastating.
• 9:12
  Penny: That location so close to the George Floyd Memorial just amplified all the existing trauma.
• 9:17
  Roy: Minneapolis public schools canceled classes for the entire district the next day. They cited fear among students and staff because of this this extreme federal presence.
• 9:27
  Penny: And the protests weren't just in Minneapolis. They erupted nationwide. Chicago, New York, Seattle.
• 9:32
  Roy: It showed how quickly Renee Nicole Good's death was politicized, how it touched a nerve across the country.
• 9:38
  Penny: Governor Walls' response at that moment was really telling. He put the National Guard on alert.
• 9:43
  Roy: But he urged protesters to stay peaceful. He specifically warned that any violence would just give the federal government what they want.
• 9:50
  Penny: A justification.
• 9:51
  Roy: The justification they needed to validate their domestic terrorism narrative and escalate even further.
• 9:57
  Penny: So if we pull all this together, what's the big takeaway here? I mean, what does this all mean?
• 10:01
  Roy: I think it's about how the killing of a US citizen, a legal observer, during an operation targeting immigrants. It just fundamentally changes the game.
• 10:13
  Penny: It exposes a willingness from the administration to not only use overwhelming force.
• 10:19
  Roy: But to then immediately use the most extreme rhetoric possible, domestic terrorism, to justify it and crucially to block any and all outside investigation.
• 10:31
  Penny: It sets a terrifying precedent.
• 10:33
  Roy: A terrifying precedent for federal power in any city that might resist. They turned an accountability crisis into a full blown narrative war.
• 10:41
  Penny: And
• 10:49
  Roy: then the decisive move by the FBI to shut down any independent state investigation.
• 10:53
  Penny: A stark reality about power and truth just comes into focus, doesn't it?
• 10:57
  Roy: It does. The fight for justice in this case seems to rely less on the official channels, which were compromised from minute one.
• 11:03
  Penny: And more on the community's own ability to document
• 11:06
  Roy: In this age of instant documentation, rapid fire narratives, when the government is investigating itself, maybe that collective camera eye of the neighborhood is the only real check we have.
• 11:16
  Penny: Does accountability now hinge entirely on a citizen with a cell phone being in the right place at the right time?
• 11:22
  Roy: That really is the question, isn't it? The video becomes the factual anchor that allows local leaders to even have a fight to push back when the legal system itself has been obstructed.
• 11:33
  Penny: Thank you for taking this deep dive with us.