The city of Minneapolis is reeling after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother, on Wednesday.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that the shooting prevented “an act of domestic terrorism” and that Good “weaponized her vehicle against law enforcement.” Witnesses and videos of the incident, however, appear to contradict the secretary’s version of events.
Hours after the shooting, eyewitness Emily Heller joined “All In with Chris Hayes” to share what she saw on the street in her neighborhood that morning.
Heller told Hayes that she was in her house making breakfast when she began to hear whistles from the street. She said her community had become “pretty organized” since federal agents descended on Minneapolis, using whistles to alert neighbors to their presence.
“I came out onto my front porch and there was a woman who was a protester, she was blocking traffic with her car,” Heller said, adding that the driver appeared to be holding up “six or seven” ICE vehicles.
The Minneapolis resident said the agents were “screaming” at Good to move her vehicle. “Then they got really aggressive, and one went over to her driver’s side door and tried to open her door,” Heller recalled. “And then she obviously got spooked and started to reverse.”
“Then an officer approached her and leaned across — like, got in front of her vehicle and then leaned across the hood of her car and shot her point-blank in the face,” she said. According to Heller, the officer fired “three or four shots.”
Before the shooting, Heller described the scene as “extremely chaotic,” adding, “It didn’t seem like the ICE agents knew what they were doing. There was no plan … They seemed totally unprepared.”
That chaos appeared to continue after the shooting. In the moments after Good was shot, Heller told Hayes that agents refused to let another neighbor, who identified himself as a physician, go to her aid.
“ICE blocked it off so nobody could get close,” she said. “But you could clearly see her slumped over in the car, and this neighbor was yelling, ‘I’m a physician. Can I take vitals? Can I get a heartbeat? Like, can I please come administer CPR?’ And they were saying, ‘No, get back.’”
When asked about Noem’s claim that Good was a “domestic terrorist” who was seeking to harm agents, Heller told Hayes that the government’s attempt to cast the 37-year-old mother as the aggressor is part of why she decided to share her account of the incident.
“That’s the only reason why I’m here,” she said. “I don’t think I have the best words right now. I would not — I’d prefer to not do this. But I knew after witnessing it that this would be misconstrued into self-defense, which it actually, it absolutely is not. This was totally preventable and absolutely unnecessary.”
You can watch Heller’s full interview on “All In with Chris Hayes” in the clip at the top of the page.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.