Fatal Seconds After the Shot – How Aid Was Denied and the Investigation Was Taken Away

Note: This article contains very sensitive material.

The 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good is sitting badly wounded, seconds matter. A doctor tries to reach her. ICE officers block access. Bystanders are instructed to “just calm down.” This conduct leaves no room for whitewashing. It documents not chaos, but control – and a decision: no help.

Our reporting, which we have just completed, confirms this sequence of events unequivocally. Even if Renee Nicole Good’s chances of survival at that moment may have been slim, immediate medical care was denied to her. What matters is not only the fatal shot. What matters is that help was refused afterward – and that today efforts are being made to prevent exactly that from being independently investigated. Added to this is a step that deepens the doubts. Minnesota’s state investigative authority has confirmed that the U.S. Attorney’s Office prevented it from participating in the investigation into the fatal shooting by an ICE officer. The state was thus stripped of involvement. The investigation now lies exclusively with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, conducted under the leadership of Kash Patel. One could say that in that moment – in the precise instant when jurisdiction shifts – an invisible line is crossed. Not the line between two agencies, but the line between two truths: the public one and the state one.

Transparency, that word invoked like a talisman in democratic societies, disappears here with the ease of a shell game. In its place appears that peculiar form of opacity that disguises itself as “jurisdiction.” Independent oversight is replaced by what one might euphemistically call an “internal clarification”: a federal agency effectively investigates that part of itself most intimately aligned with the current political line. Is it not strange that precisely where death is at issue, where aid was denied, where violence cannot be undone – that precisely there the doors are closed? As if death itself were an administrative detail better handled behind closed doors. We will handle this among ourselves, for ourselves.

A doctor is held back, civilians are told to calm down, while a woman is dying. Anyone who calls this routine misunderstands its gravity. Even if medical rescue ultimately would not have succeeded, the refusal of immediate aid is a distinct act with its own weight. It raises questions about responsibility, about orders, and about the priority of containment over human life. That the investigation itself is now being placed under wraps makes the case even darker. This is simply about the basic demand for full clarification.

Renee Nicole Good is dead. What remains are images, a series of confirmed facts – and a process that withdraws itself from public scrutiny. That is precisely why this case must not fall silent.

To be continued .....