Minneapolis ICE Shooter Told Longtime Neighbor He Was a Botanist: ‘I Had No Idea He Was an ICE Agent’

The Jan. 7 shooting death of Renee Good during an encounter with an ICE officer has stunned Minneapolis and drawn global attention.

Bystander video from the scene appears to show officer Jonathan Ross—his face covered—firing several close-range shots into Good’s vehicle, including through the driver’s side front window. The car then sped away and crashed into parked vehicles along Portland Avenue, less than a mile from the site where George Floyd was killed by police in 2020.

Law enforcement sources said Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was struck in the head. She was taken to a local hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

A woman who lives near Ross in the Minneapolis suburb of Chaska, Minn., said she was shocked when she learned he had been identified as a federal agent. She said she had met him only once—at a neighborhood garage gathering during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020—when he spoke casually about his work.

“He said he worked with plants, as a botanist,” she claimed, alleging he misrepresented what he did for a living.

The neighbor said Ross mostly kept to himself and that residents did not realize he worked as a federal agent until after Good’s death. She recalled him talking about border enforcement while also emphasizing an interest in plants.

“So when I found out he was the one on the news, I said, ‘What! That’s so crazy!’” she said. “I had no idea he was an ICE agent.”

Ross has been contacted for comment.

After the shooting, the neighbor said she saw agents removing items from Ross’ home and noticed a patrol car monitoring the property.

“It really creeps me out that those are my neighbors—that that’s the kind of people I live next to. It’s really upsetting,” she said, adding that she had assumed most ICE agents worked in border states.

She also described a tense silence in the area since the incident. “People really haven’t been talking about it because you just want to maintain some peace on the road—you don’t want to start fights,” she said. “But it’s just really hard to process. And then every day, you hear about more people getting detained.”

New cell phone footage of the shooting, shared on X on Jan. 9 by Alpha News and described by the organization as recorded from Ross’ perspective, shows moments from the confrontation.

“That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you,” Good is heard saying to the person filming. Her wife, Becca Good, appears in the video recording Ross on her phone.

Another ICE officer, seen in video taken from other angles as he tries to open the driver’s side door, shouts, “Get out of the car. Get out of the car. Get out of the f—ing car!”

Good is shown reversing and then turning the wheel to the right as she pulls forward, while her wife says, “Drive, baby, drive — drive!”

Multiple gunshots then ring out. A voice behind the camera says, “F—ing bitch.” The clip ends with the sound of a crash.

In public remarks shortly after the shooting, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Good refused commands to exit her vehicle and then tried to run over federal agents, calling her actions a “domestic act of terrorism,” according to CBS.

Vice President JD Vance echoed that framing in a post on X on Friday, writing that the Alpha News video showed the ICE agent’s life was “endangered” and that he “fired in self-defense.”

State and local officials, however, said the footage suggests something very different.

“They are already trying to spin this as an action of self-defense, having seen the video for myself, I want to tell everybody directly, that is bulls—,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said at a press conference on Jan. 8. “This was an agent recklessly using power that resulted in somebody getting killed.”

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz reposted a DHS statement on X on Jan. 7, writing, “I’ve seen the video. Don’t believe this propaganda machine.”