Renee Good came to Minneapolis seeking a safe place. Less than a year later, she was killed.

Renee Nicole Macklin Good was building a new life with her wife and son in Minneapolis.

They had just moved to the Powderhorn neighborhood on the city’s diverse, working-class South Side, where murals and yard signs for progressive causes are plentiful. That was welcoming for the Goods, a queer couple that relocated here from Missouri by way of Canada. A former neighbor told the Minnesota Star Tribune the Goods fled there to figure out their next move after Donald Trump was re-elected.

But less than a year after arriving in Minnesota, Good was fatally shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent a few blocks from where they lived.

Her killing has set off a nationwide reckoning over aggressive tactics used by ICE to remove undocumented immigrants — one of the top campaign priorities of the Trump administration. Its leaders and supporters say Good was a “domestic terrorist” impeding enforcement, but those who knew her paint a much different picture.

What brought Good to this city — now the scene of the largest ongoing ICE surge in the country — requires untangling a web of cross-country moves and name changes since growing up in a Christian household in Colorado Springs and twice becoming a military wife. Nearly two decades later, she was in love with Rebecca Good and seeking refuge in Minneapolis.

“I think she just maybe wanted a fresh start, a more open community,” her former sister-in-law Jessica Fletcher told the Star Tribune.

What remained a constant throughout life for Renee Good, 37, a poet and mother to three children, was caring for others, her friends and family said.

“She was an extraordinary mother, devoted, fiercely loving, and always putting her children at the center of her world. A poet, musician, and lifelong learner — she moved through life with wonder and a drive to create and understand the world around her.”

Before gunshots rang out the morning of Jan. 7 in the chaotic scene so close to home, Renee Good can be heard on video telling ICE agent Jonathan Ross “I’m not mad at you.”

In the immediate aftermath, Rebecca Good is shown on bystander video crying out and saying they were new here. She was holding their dog on the sidewalk, her face covered in blood as neighbors rallied around what quickly became a crime scene.

“That’s my wife,” she said. “I made her come down here. It’s my fault.”

In her only public statement since the killing, Rebecca Good told Minnesota Public Radio they moved to Minnesota “to make a better life for ourselves.

Renee Good’s ethic of caring, rooted in her religious faith, started early.

Growing up in Colorado Springs, she went on a church mission trip to Northern Ireland as a teenager in the mid-2000s. Rebecca Hainsworth, who was also on the trip, remembers Renee singing “Over the Rainbow” to quell her friend’s melancholy about missing home.

“Anyone who spent a second with Renee knows she had the most gorgeous singing voice,” said Hainsworth, who now resides in Northern Ireland. “She was an artist. A gentle, gentle, gentle person.”

It was Renee’s habit to look out for her neighbors in need, she said. Seeing if everybody had enough food, enough to drink. The two shared a room in a farming community outside Belfast. A lot can fade over 20 years; friendships drift apart. But as a fuller, often contradictory picture of Good emerges, it’s the memory of that summer that remains for Hainsworth: spending days together, doing Bible studies with Northern Irish teenagers, and at night, hearing Renee’s tender voice.

“I’ve watched that video [of the shooting] a thousand times,” Hainsworth said. “I was in that girl’s car. That’s totally her [to wave along an ICE agent’s vehicle]. Nope, ‘you go first.’ I just know she was probably terrified.”

“Nae-Nae gave everything she had to take care of her friends and family, and indeed people she never met,” the statement said. “If there was any celebration for any one of us, Nae amplified it. If there was sorrow, she was with you for all of it. Nae found joy in others being comforted and was herself a fountain of comfort.”

After graduating from Coronado High School in Colorado Springs in 2006, she later attended Metropolitan State University of Denver during the 2015-16 academic year but didn’t obtain a degree, a spokesman told the the Star Tribune.

She married Justin Sheppard in 2009 and filed for divorce in 2015. He was granted custody of their two kids the following year as Renee was living in Virginia at that time, according to court records.

In Virginia, Renee Good lived with her second husband, Timmy Macklin Jr., who was friends with Sheppard while they both served in the military, Fletcher said.

Renee and Timmy got married in 2018 and Renee attended college at Old Dominion University. She was pregnant with her third child in 2019 while enrolled in the English program. Condolences from her professors and classmates have flooded social media.

In 2020, she graduated from Old Dominion and won an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her award-winning poem, “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs,” is reaching poets locally and nationally as the literary world mourns her death.

The lines of the poem end with: “Life is merely / to ovum and sperm / and where those two meet / and how often and how well / and what dies there.”

Fletcher said Renee’s marriage with Macklin began to strain after the pandemic. The couple decided to travel to New York City and Paris before landing in Oregon, where some of Macklin’s family lives.

He took a leave of absence for their travels and was discharging from the Air Force. Fletcher said the couple split in December 2022, before his unexpected death in May 2023, but they did not officially divorce.

She said her former sister-in-law had previously known Rebecca Good, who is from Iowa, but she wasn’t sure where or when they met.

“I think it was best for her to go her separate way,“ Fletcher said. ”I think that they also, in that same breath, had a lot of love for each other. I think the happiest times of [Macklin’s] life were when he was with Renee. The military just really took a toll on him and the Trump administration, which is, like, very ironic.”

Fletcher said that her former sister-in-law “was a political person in the sense that she was really passionate about things that mattered ... But no, I don’t know her to be an activist in that way. Even during George Floyd and everything, I didn’t think that they were out necessarily protesting and stuff.”

Renee and Rebecca Good started creating a life together in Kansas City, though they did not apply for a marriage license there, according to public court records.

They owned B. Good Handywork LLC, a household repair and maintenance business registered in 2024.

The business operated out of their home in the Waldo neighborhood. Jennifer Ferguson, a former neighbor, said her core memory of Renee and Becca Good is “hearing laughter float from their house across the street to mine on a regular basis — in the morning, 7:30 in the morning.”

Ferguson said there weren’t other kids in the neighborhood, but Good’s son played with Ferguson’s daughter and always shouted to them, “Have nice day.” During school, she said the Goods were gracious, offering to watch her daughter after school if she was “running a few minutes late and no one’s home, just tell her to come over.” She also remembers Renee’s two older children visiting for a month in the summer.

She said they didn’t talk politics. There were no political yards signs. But she said “we both understood that we were both on the liberal end, but I don’t like to get into all that stuff.”

Ferguson said she doesn’t believe Renee Good confronted ICE that morning in Minneapolis “with any intent to start a violent interaction.”

”From everything I knew she was a good woman, a good mom, a good partner and it’s just tragic her family has lost her," she said.

Ferguson said the Goods left Missouri in December 2024 right after the holidays, breaking their lease. She said they planned to spend some time visiting family before going to Canada, ending up in Minneapolis in March 2025.

Fletcher said that the Goods visited the Macklin family in Oregon and Tennessee with Renee’s 6-year-old son before moving to Minneapolis in March or April 2025.

They remained in touch and maintained relationships with the young boy, who has now lost both his father and mother.

“We ask that Renee’s three children be held in your hearts,” the Macklin family said. “... all three have had their lives changed in ways no one should ever have to experience.”

Renee Good described herself online as a “poet and writer and wife and mom and shitty guitar strummer from Colorado; experiencing Minneapolis.”

Little is available online about the Goods’ time in Minnesota. Their social media accounts are private. Neighbors mostly knew them in passing. It’s unclear where they worked and how they spent their days. Renee’s ex-husband, who did not respond to requests for comment, told the AP that she had been a stay-at-home mom in recent years.

Vice President JD Vance said she was part of a “left-wing network” and victim of a “tragedy of her own making.”

Neighbors in the community she briefly called home, now ground zero in a growing anti-ICE movement, remember her friendly greetings when walking the dog. She was known for hosting poetry workshops at her son’s elementary school, said former physical education teacher Rashad Rich.

“If the school needed help in any way from parents or field trips or anything, they were really great people,” Rich said.

The Goods believed in liberal causes, he said, a focus at the school especially following the murder of George Floyd just blocks from where Renee was killed. Rich said he’s heartbroken for Good’s family and angered by the outcome.

“There are so many other things that we could do before we want to kill somebody,” he said. “So many other things that could have been done.”