Rashomon in Minneapolis

Article by - HistoryBoomer Jan 10, 2026

Three days ago (January 7), Renee Good, a citizen, was shot and killed by Jonathan Ross, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent. She was 37 years old and a mother of three.

Multiple videos surfaced, showing the tragedy from different angles, but there was no consensus on why Good died. For many on the left, it was cold-blooded murder by an ICE agent. For others, the agent was acting in self-defense as he faced Good’s dangerously accelerating car.

Each side was amazed the other couldn’t see what was so obvious in each video. It was the blue-and-black dress controversy, but with much higher stakes. Rashomon in the real world.1

So what really went down?

That Wednesday morning, Good sat in her parked maroon Honda Pilot, partially blocking traffic on Portland Avenue. She was cheerfully bouncing to the noise of the honking horns and protesters blowing whistles. Her wife was outside the car. They thought ICE rounding up illegal immigrants was wrong and were there to oppose it. Her wife later said, “We had whistles, they had guns.”

Although Good’s car was parked at a diagonal, it was still possible to pass her, and some cars were doing so. A gaggle of unmarked ICE vehicles was lined up nearby. One agent, later identified as Jonathan Ross, began circling her car, counter-clockwise, filming with a cell phone camera.

Ross’s 47-second video starts on the right side of Good’s Honda as he steps out of his own vehicle. He approaches, holding his cell phone and filming as he walks. There is a dog looking out the right rear window of Good’s Honda.2




Good leans out her window as Ross approaches, still with a half smile. She says, “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.” Ross says nothing, just keeps circling.

Article continues here https://open.substack.com/pub/historyboomer/p/rashomon-in-minneapolis and the author does a good job.

1
Rashomon (1950) was a film directed by Akira Kurosawa that depicted a murder described by four different narrators. It gave birth to the concept of “the Rashomon effect,” highlighting the unreliability of witnesses.