“That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you. I’m not mad at any of you.”
Renee Good said those words to a federal agent on a Minneapolis street on the morning of January 7, 2026, and moments later he fired three bullets into her car and killed her.
Renee was 37 years old. She was an American citizen and a mother of three who had dropped her six year old son off at school that morning and was driving home through her own south Minneapolis neighborhood with her partner, Becca, and the family dog, Wapsie, riding along with her. She served on the school board at her son’s school and had applied to work there as a substitute teacher. She wrote poetry. She was getting ready to start a master’s degree in English, and no agency had her under investigation for anything.
On October 1, her family filed two federal lawsuits over her death. I’m a trial lawyer, and I’ve read every one of the 181 pages in those two complaints.1
My verdict is simple.
This family has winning cases, and every American who wants a government that answers to the law has a stake in how they turn out.
What happened on Portland Avenue
Federal immigration agents flooded the Twin Cities that winter in a crackdown the government called Operation Metro Surge. Renee stopped her Honda Pilot on Portland Avenue between 33rd and 34th Streets and honked her horn to warn neighbors that agents were nearby. Becca got out and started filming the agents with her phone, and Renee stayed behind the wheel.
About eleven vehicles drove around her stopped car without any trouble. One of them was an unmarked Chevrolet Tahoe driven by Jonathan Ross, an ICE deportation officer. Ross got out with his own phone already recording and circled her car. As he passed her open window, Renee told him calmly that she wasn’t mad at him or at any of them.
Then a pickup truck carrying two more agents stopped on the other side of her car. Renee waved them past and told them to go around. They got out. One of them shouted at her to get out of the car, with a curse word thrown in, and one of the agents tried to open her driver’s side door.
Renee backed up a short distance. She turned her wheels to the right, away from Ross, and started to roll forward slowly.
Here is what the lawsuit says happened next, and the video supports the heart of it. Ross moved his body out of the car’s path. He drew his gun with his right hand, his phone still in his left, and leaned toward the car to fire one round through the lower left corner of the windshield. As the car kept turning away from him, he fired twice more through the open driver’s side window from the side of the vehicle, at a moment when nothing and no one stood in the car’s path. One of those two bullets entered Renee’s left temple.
Her car rolled down the street out of control and crashed into a parked car, and the complaint says Ross cursed as it went. Becca had been standing a few feet from the car when the gun went off, and she ran down the street to the wreck and found her partner bleeding from a gunshot wound to the head, with the same agents who had boxed in the car standing nearby and offering no help of any kind.
No agent gave Renee medical aid. When a bystander stepped forward and said he was a physician, an agent ordered him back and told him, “I don’t care.” Renee reached Hennepin County Medical Center at 10:03 a.m. in cardiac arrest, roughly 25 minutes after the first 911 calls, and doctors pronounced her dead at 10:30. The county medical examiner ruled her death a homicide caused by multiple gunshot wounds. An independent autopsy found that one bullet passed through her left forearm and another passed through her right breast. The fatal bullet entered her left temple and came out the right side of her head.
Federal officials told the public that Ross fired in self defense after the car struck him and left him with internal bleeding. They also called Renee’s conduct an act of domestic terrorism. Within a week, the Justice Department said it saw no basis for a federal civil rights investigation.
Two cases built for two different jobs
Federal law makes it hard to sue the government when one of its officers kills someone, so the family’s lawyers filed two separate cases in federal court in Minnesota. Here's what happens next, from a trial lawyer who has spent 40 years litigating cases and taking them to verdict. I'm not holding back, including the part the government hopes you never hear about.2
The first case sues the United States itself under the Federal Tort Claims Act. That law lets a family sue the federal government for harm its employees cause on the job, as long as the family first files a written claim with the agencies involved and gives them six months to respond.
Brent Ganger, Renee’s brother, filed his claim on March 11, and Becca filed hers on March 17. The agencies answered with six months of nothing, which under this law counts as a no. Judge Jeffrey Bryan will decide the case himself, with no jury, because this law requires it. The complaint brings seven claims under Minnesota law. They include wrongful death, battery, assault, false imprisonment, and negligence, along with claims for intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress, including Becca’s claims for watching her partner die.
The second case goes after people. It names Ross along with Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff; Kristi Noem, who ran the Department of Homeland Security during the operation; Corey Lewandowski, Noem’s adviser; Tom Homan, the White House border czar; Todd Lyons, the acting director of ICE; Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol commander who ran Metro Surge on the ground; and ten agents whose names the government still refuses to release. This case asks for a jury and seeks punitive damages. Its centerpiece is the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, and it adds claims under the Fourth Amendment and Minnesota tort law. Judge Laura Provinzino has it.
Brent brings both cases as the trustee the court appointed for Renee’s next of kin, a group made up of her three children, her mother Donna, her father Tim, and her four siblings. Renee was the main provider for her household and for her youngest child, and her two older children spent summers and alternating holidays in her care.
Becca sues for her own injuries. She and Renee moved to Minneapolis together and were raising Renee’s six year old son as a family. They never legally married, and Becca brings her claims as the eyewitness she became that morning. Doctors have diagnosed her with post traumatic stress disorder and insomnia. She wakes in a panic with her heart racing, and she lives with flashbacks, chest pains, headaches, and digestive trouble. She lost at least 15 pounds in the weeks after the shooting and sees a therapist every week along with a psychiatrist.
The rulebook Ross ignored
In 2023, the Department of Homeland Security put its use of force rules in writing, and those rules bind every officer in the department. They allow deadly force only when an officer reasonably believes someone poses an imminent threat of death or serious injury. They forbid deadly force used only to stop someone from getting away. They forbid shooting at the driver of a moving vehicle except when deadly force is otherwise justified, and they require an officer to weigh the danger of a car with nobody in control before he fires. They tell officers to stay out of positions where shooting becomes their only option. They order officers to get medical help for anyone they injure as soon as it is practical to do so, and they place a duty on every officer to step in and stop another officer’s excessive force.
The lawsuit lines up each of Ross’s three shots against these rules and finds a violation every time.
When the government writes the rulebook and its own agent breaks every page, that rulebook becomes the family’s best witness.
These rules do a second job in court. The Federal Tort Claims Act protects the government when its employees make honest judgment calls, and a mandatory rule leaves no judgment call to protect. An officer who fires at a driver turning away from him has broken a direct order.
The Constitution points the same direction. In 1985, the Supreme Court held in Tennessee v. Garner that officers have no right to use deadly force on a fleeing person who poses no immediate danger to anyone. In 2025, in Barnes v. Felix, the Court told judges to weigh everything that led up to a shooting, and that matters here because Ross chose to step toward a moving car with a phone filling one of his hands and then fired from the side as Renee drove away from him.
Facing the government’s side of the story
A good trial lawyer puts the bad facts on the table before the other side does, so here they are.
The government will say the car hit Ross. The complaint itself admits that his left hand, still holding his phone, touched the car near the left headlight as he leaned in to fire the first shot. The government will play the video of Becca shouting “Drive, baby, drive” as an agent repeated his order for Renee to get out, and it will argue that Renee fled a lawful command. The video also shows her SUV partly blocking the road with her horn sounding again and again.
None of those facts turns three shots into self defense. About eleven vehicles, Ross’s own Tahoe among them, drove around that car. ICE agents have no authority to enforce Minnesota traffic law, and the lawsuit says another agent told Renee to leave the scene, which put two opposite orders in her ears at once. A frightened partner’s shout gives no federal agent a license to kill the driver, and DHS rules forbid deadly force aimed at stopping someone from leaving.
A hand brushing a headlight as an officer leans in to shoot tells you how close he chose to stand.
Physics settles the rest. The second and third shots came through the open driver’s side window as the car turned away from Ross, and the bullet that killed Renee entered the left side of her head, the side that faced him as she rolled past, which tells you exactly where he stood when he pulled the trigger.
Who put Ross on that street, according to the lawsuit
The second lawsuit makes a bigger claim. It says Ross’s shots were the predictable and intended product of an operation that senior federal officials designed hand in hand with private players to target Minnesotans of Somali and Hispanic descent and to scare into silence the neighbors who watched the agents and warned others, neighbors like Renee.
The complaint traces the spark to November 19, 2025, when Christopher Rufo and Ryan Thorpe published a City Journal report claiming Minnesota taxpayers were the largest funder of the Somali terror group al Shabaab. Rufo then pushed the President publicly to end protected immigration status for Somali nationals. Two days later, the President announced the end of that status and said of Somalis, “Send them back to where they came from.” The lawsuit quotes him calling Somalis garbage. Minnesota has the largest Somali community in the country, and more than 90 percent of Somalis in America are United States citizens who face no immigration enforcement at all.
The complaint names a list of fellow conspirators it chose not to sue: social media figures Nick Shirley and Ben Bergquam, Rufo himself, the data company Palantir Technologies, the facial recognition company Clearview AI, and the President. Presidents have immunity from civil damages for their official acts, so the family sued the officials who, the lawsuit says, turned his words into orders.
Corey Lewandowski’s place on the defendant list is the sharpest move in the case. He managed Trump’s 2016 campaign and came into Homeland Security as a special government employee, a status federal law caps at 130 days in any year. The lawsuit says he used up those days before the operation began and acted as a private person from then on. That detail matters because in 2017 the Supreme Court protected top federal officials accused of conspiring among themselves inside a single branch of government, and a conspiracy that reaches outside the government into private hands is much harder to wave away.
The complaint also quotes an email Bovino wrote during an earlier operation in Chicago. In it he said he corrected Lyons and turned down his suggestion to start with two weeks of targeted operations before full enforcement, and he added that he reported to Lewandowski.
A federal judge had already found that agents in this operation stopped Somali and Hispanic people based on race or ethnicity without reasonable suspicion. The lawsuit says leaders received warning after warning and responded by adding about 2,100 more agents. They disciplined no one.
The 1871 law includes a clause aimed at people who go in disguise on the highway to strip a group of the equal protection of the laws. Congress wrote it for night riders. The lawsuit says Ross and the agents around him wore masks, displayed no names or badge numbers, drove unmarked vehicles with license plates not registered in Minnesota, and never identified themselves.
Trump removed Noem as Homeland Security Secretary on March 5, 2026. The complaint ties her fall to the uproar over Renee’s death and the killing of Alex Pretti, another American citizen, in Minneapolis weeks later.
Why the courts make families fight uphill
The family’s lawyers know the obstacles, and they built these cases around them.
The Supreme Court has spent nearly a decade shrinking the right to sue a federal officer personally for violating the Constitution. Since 2017 the Court has refused to extend that right to any new setting, and its 2022 decision in Egbert v. Boule shut out a claim against a Border Patrol agent. The family argues that this case fits the original model the Court approved back in 1971, a rank and file officer seizing a person on an American street during ordinary police work, and that argument deserves to win.
Ross will also claim qualified immunity, a shield which protects officers unless the law clearly forbade what they did. Top officials will lean on a 2009 decision called Ashcroft v. Iqbal, which threw out discrimination claims against senior federal officials for failing to show each official’s personal intent, and the 149 page conspiracy complaint reads like a document written to clear that exact bar.
Procedure hides two more traps. The Attorney General will likely certify that Ross acted within the scope of his job, which lets the government step into his shoes on the Minnesota tort claims and turns them into copies of the first case. The family answers with a newer argument that a carve out in that law for constitutional violations keeps Ross personally on the hook. The second trap is a rule that a final ruling on the merits in the first case, even a loss for the family, shuts the door on claims against Ross himself. A dismissal on one of the law’s technical exceptions does not trigger that rule. With two judges handling two cases, the timing of each ruling matters a great deal.
Neither complaint names a dollar figure. The first case seeks money for the terror and pain Renee suffered before she lost consciousness and for everything her death took from her family, including her income, her care, her advice, and her companionship. That law bars punitive damages and interest before judgment. It also caps recovery at the amounts on the family’s claim forms except when new evidence or intervening facts come to light, and it limits attorney fees to 25 percent.
The second case seeks punitive damages against every defendant, money for Renee’s loss of life and her lost lifetime accumulations, the cost of Becca’s past and future medical and psychological care, the cost of securing her home, and attorney fees. The conspiracy claims carry a one year deadline, and the family filed with about three months to spare.
Here is my bottom line on the odds. The first case is where this family wins. The government gets no qualified immunity there, and its own rulebook testifies against it.
Still waiting on answers
Nobody faces criminal charges. The FBI, the Minnesota Attorney General, and the Hennepin County Attorney all opened investigations in January, and in March the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office and two state agencies sued the administration to get the evidence in the deaths of Renee and Alex Pretti, and the Justice Department turned over the files in July, and as of today no prosecutor has announced a charging decision.
Renee’s mother, Donna, and her brother Brent testified before Congress days before the family filed. Watch for the Attorney General’s certification on Ross, any fight over which case moves first, court approval for the family’s Chicago lawyers to appear in Minnesota, and the names of the ten masked agents.
This is how a free people checks power
“I consider trial by jury as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which government can be held to the principles of its constitution.” -Thomas Jefferson
In every jury trial I handle, I share this quote with the jury panel during selection. We talk about what it means to live in a country that guarantees the right to trial by jury, and about the privilege and duty that come with it. Most people on this planet will never hold that kind of power over their own government. Every person in my jury box does.
Whether it’s a court or jury trial, lawsuits like these are how ordinary Americans hold the biggest government on earth to its own rules. When prosecutors stay quiet and agencies sit on claims for six months, a civil courtroom becomes the one place where a grieving family gets to put officials under oath, demand their emails, question their commanders, and make the government explain itself to a judge and a jury.
That reach has to extend to the agents on the street, the officials who sent them, the private companies feeding them data, and the influencers filming for clicks. Every one of them answers to the same Constitution you do.
A government that will not answer to a grieving family in court has stopped answering to you.
Share Renee’s story with someone who still thinks this would never happen on their street, and tell them her family is in court right now fighting for the right of every American to get home alive after school drop off.
Mitch Jackson, Esq.
Federal law forced the family’s lawyers to split their claims into two cases. The FTCA case against the United States is the main way to make the government pay for harm its employees cause. Its rules are strict. Only the United States can be sued, the family had to file administrative claims and wait six months, a judge decides without a jury, and punitive damages are barred. The individual case goes after Ross, Miller, Noem, and the others personally. Only this path offers a jury, punitive damages, and Ku Klux Klan Act conspiracy claims reaching up the chain of command. Romanucci’s team says the two suits target related wrongs: the shooting, and the operation that put Ross on that street.
The split is also strategic. The FTCA case is the safer route to money, since qualified immunity doesn’t apply and DHS’s own use-of-force policy works against the government. The riskier individual case could open discovery into how Operation Metro Surge was planned. It carries a risk too. Under 28 U.S.C. § 2676, a merits ruling in the FTCA case can bar claims against Ross, so the lawyers must manage which case moves first before two different judges. Any party can move to consolidate under Rule 42(a) because the cases share common facts. Consolidation can cover discovery, pretrial motions, or a joint trial.
Thank you for covering this, and in such detail. These murders, by our government, with our tax dollars make me absolutely sick.
Yup, Wrongful death, excessive force, defamation, assault with a deadly weapon just to name a few....