Competing realities baked in before facts in Minneapolis shooting
The images of this American tragedy playing out on our streets are stark, and gory.
A photo of the front seat of Renee Good’s wrecked Honda Pilot showed a blood-splattered air bag and a stuffed toy sticking out from the glove box.
The back window of her mom-mobile had a dozen stickers, as some families will do to designate their civic engagement.
The driver’s front windshield had a bullet hole in the lower corner that denotes the cataclysmic last moments of her life.
Federal officials were quick to toss around terms like “domestic terrorism” or “violent rioters” to justify — or somehow even sanitize — her death.
There was almost a smug feeling that she had it coming. You know, fool around and find out.
Many others quickly called it murder, saying it is the ultimate embodiment of a heavy-handed government leaning into authoritarianism.
Pouring hundreds of masked military-garbed agents onto American avenues has been a tactic of this administration that carries a sense of third-world, tin-pot ruler to it.
The two competing accounts emerged quickly Wednesday and were baked into reality for two Americas that will never back up, never concede and never let truth or facts darken their worldviews.
Let me predict that the ICE officer who shot Good to death in Minneapolis will never be tried, much less convicted.
If he is charged by the state, his lawyer will move to have the case tried in federal court.
At first glance, this looks like a bad shooting. One of federal agents converging on the SUV driven by Good has been termed an ICE “observer,” and then shot her as she tried to drive away.
Agents shouted for Good to get out of the car, and one reached in to open her door. She backed up the vehicle and cut her tires to be able to drive off on the icy street.
Another ICE agent who had circled her car, holding his cellphone as if he was videoing the incident, ended up standing in front of the vehicle. He instantly pulled his weapon and started shooting as she tried to drive away.
One video, shot from behind the incident, shows the agent jumping back and firing into the vehicle. A second video, shot from the front, shows he may have been barely brushed by it.
President Donald Trump went to social media to say she “violently, willfully and viciously ran over the ICE officer,” adding “it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital.”
Nothing like baking in the official opinion before the facts are known.
I called J. Tom Morgan, the longtime DeKalb County district attorney who is now a law professor and has both prosecuted and defended such cases.
He told me that “juries give officers the benefit of the doubt over and over.” That is, he said, because law enforcement agents must make “life-and-death, split-second decisions.”
That agent will no doubt argue he was reacting to “deadly force,” which was Good’s Honda Pilot. However, that’s not carte blanche to kill with impunity.
For years, police procedure has had officers backing off from shooting at fleeing vehicles, as they once did.
“Any time you kill a driver, it can seriously endanger other people,” Morgan said.
This time, the agent’s shots turned the moving vehicle into an unguided missile that crashed into a parked car about 100 feet away. Fortunately, nobody else was hurt.
The agent would argue that the bullet hole through the front windshield backs an argument that he was in “reasonable fear” for his life.
Vice President JD Vance noted that same agent was dragged by a vehicle during an arrest last June, resulting in him receiving dozens of stitches.
“So you think maybe he’s a little bit sensitive about somebody ramming him,” Vance said.
I think they call that itchy trigger finger. And it’s not how professional policing should operate.
However, Morgan noted that the two shots fired through the open driver’s side window could be more problematic. The autopsy could tell which bullets killed her.
But as I predicted earlier, I’d be surprised if the ICE agent is criminally punished. On Thursday, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension announced the FBI and the Justice Department were not cooperating with their investigation of the shooting.
This has whitewash written all over it.
Trump later backed away, a bit, on his statements about the case in an interview with the New York Times. But this episode is a signpost on the road we’re heading to damnation, or more so, a government’s war on its own people.
Those protesting or trying to throw themselves in the hard grinding gears of government are ultimately risking harm to themselves.
And it wouldn’t surprise me if Trump and some of his minions are hoping for overreaction from the left, of burning buildings, overturned cars and bottle-throwing crowds.
That helps gin up the law-and-order narrative that Republicans would like going into what appears to be, for them, a messy mid-term election.
About the Author
Bill Torpy, who writes about metro Atlanta for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, joined the newspaper in 1990.
