CRITICA

Renee Nicole Good was 37 years-old when her life was abruptly extinguished by a masked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent on January 7, 2026. He fired three close range bullets at her torso and head as she sat inside of her Honda Pilot on a Minneapolis city street. Her wife, Becca Good, was on the scene and yelled, “They just shot my wife!” The couple’s dog, Hazelnut, was present in the car when she was killed. Renee Good is also survived by her three children, ages 6, 12, and 15, and her parents and four siblings. Renee was a devoted mother and a loving spouse, often sharing her family life through social media posts. She was an avid writer and poet, having won the Academy of American Poets Prize in 2020. With prior study in vocal performance, she was a lover of music and singing, particularly with accompaniment by her guitar. She was a committed Christian who previously participated in youth mission trips to Northern Ireland.  Renee was described by her loved ones as kind, caring, and made of sunshine.

Alex Pretti, also 37 years-old and a good Samaritan resident of Minneapolis, was killed execution-style by U.S. Customs and Border Protection gunmen on January 24, 2026. While being pinned face down on the ground of a snowy city street by multiple CBP officers, at least ten shots were fired into his backside in under 5 seconds. Alex is survived by his parents and sister, and a young daughter. Alex was a dedicated V.A. Healthcare Systems ICU nurse who was remembered as tirelessly caring for his patients and his co-workers. He was known by all as an outdoorsperson who loved mountain biking and who perennially donned a friendly smile. He regularly enchanted others with his clever sense of humor. As a child, he was a Boy Scout and sang in the Green Bay Boys Choir. Friends and family said that he had an uncommonly caring spirit, devoting his life to improving the lives of others. 

Renee’s and Alex’s family and communities are experiencing intangible deaths as well. In addition to acute feelings of grief, horror, disbelief, and heartbreak, they all imagined a future with their loved one in which they would share conversations, hugs, travel, music, time outdoors, holidays, and milestone events like birthdays and graduations. They envisioned weathering life’s travails together, from the mundane all the way to the exceptional. Their loved ones thought they could count on the supportive roles that Renee and Alex played in their lives which would become woven into their ongoing life narratives. They expected to hear their inimitable voices each day, and the varied facial expressions and mannerisms which made them viscerally familiar. They felt power at being able to protect their loved one, and now that, too, is gone. The memories of the past they held near and dear are now splattered with blood.

The men who perpetrated the killings are forever changed. They may ultimately not survive the crushing psychological consequences of their highly contested decisions to gun down their fellow citizens. They may be experiencing post-traumatic stress symptoms. Conversely, their minds might have receded into dissociative states as the only antidote to fragmentation. They may have found themselves in constant oscillation between rage toward the public and shame and anger toward themselves. They might lock into a rigid, dehumanizing stance, which could cascade into loss of empathy and feeling, cascading further into withdrawal, substance abuse, depression. Their loved ones are experiencing acute disorientation and loss as well, which could, and likely will, materialize long term anguish.

Every American is also suffering irreversible loss precipitated by the assassinations of these two people. We are questioning whether safety and justice exist any longer. Trust toward “protective” institutions is shattered. We acutely wonder about meaning and purpose when state-sanctioned terror arbitrarily determines who will live and who will die. Any confidence that our country is based in morality and fairness is a thing of the past. Where there was once hope, there may now, at least for a time, be disengagement and despair. We may struggle to imagine a better future for our society. We may publicly hold our bodies, and our thoughts and words, differently than ever before. The opportunity to pause and come together in collective rituals to mourn these casualties and their reverberations is stymied by gas-lighting political rhetoric, rapid-fire news cycles, and warranted fear produced by continued Homeland Security operations. Grief goes unprocessed. Even mourning is lost. 

The killings of Renee and Alex are catastrophic. Annihilation and loss are reproduced over and over again in everyone who knew them, and in everyone who didn’t. I won’t permit the slayers and their tactics to decimate my humanity, my voice. I keep thinking about the last exchange between Renee and the officer. She calmly said to him on audio recording, “That’s fine dude, I’m not mad at you.” Seconds later, after murdering her, he yelled, “Fucking bitch!” into the same recording device. Was it easy to kill her, in part, because females are farmed to serve others in our society and are punished with any variety of violent actions if they fail this function? How will her loved ones possibly cope with the knowledge that Renee’s killer simultaneously tore her life and humanity away in three bullets and two words? And what of her children? I’m picturing the moment they were told that their mom was killed, imagining them disintegrating like pieces of paper lit on fire. And for the rest of their lives, having to explain to every new person they meet that their mom is dead and…how and why she died. If I can’t make sense of this, for fuck’s sake, how will they?  This is where my revenge fantasies really get going, fueled by rage, incredulity, and despair. But I owe it to Renee, and to myself, to pause and take space to feel all of the feelings about her death. Because her death represents all of our deaths. 

The fact that Alex was still mourning the passing of his beloved Catahoula Leopard dog, Joule, when his life was taken continues to haunt me. Apparently, that relationship brought new meaning to the term, “man’s best friend”. I’m also thinking of the humans who considered him as a devoted friend. How many ICU shifts will come and go, before the phantom pains of his co-workers start to diminish? “Wait, that’s right, he will never emerge through those doors again with his loving smile.” Will the creatures and trees of local nature, where he spent countless hours, notice that this gentle visitor no longer appears? I wonder if his family and communities will walk their remaining time on earth in stomach-pitted bewilderment. These surviving beings are forced to live with the reality that Alex was made an example of to warn all Americans that white men who peacefully protest the government’s violence forfeit their First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, Eight, and Tenth Amendment rights.

My dear friend Shifa Haq describes the gauntlet of mourning in the context of state sanctioned murder this way: “The license to kill derives from the construction of an identifiable enemy whose body is decontextualized to assert the sovereign power. Stripped of affective, bodily and ideological grounding, the killable body is also the unmournable body whose violent death or deadly torture is disavowed” (Haq, 2021, p. 31). She puts forth an ethical imperative to dream the undreamt of traumatic experiences in order to infuse the lost ones with empathy and new life. This reflects the disobedience of mourning in the context of institutionalized terror. 

Renee and Alex were humans with whole worlds of their own inhabited by countless other sentient beings. They were peacefully performing civil disobedience of inhumane violations by ICE and CBP. They didn’t realize they were putting their lives on the line. For their passionate advocacy of vulnerable communities, I am willing to keep making contact with my own vulnerability, holding my wounds open, petitioning for truth, in order to remember and feel and acknowledge these traumatic deaths. I will keep dreaming Renee and Alex in hopes that their loved ones will someday, somehow be able to reclaim their lives.

Reference

Haq, S. (2021). In search of return: Mourning the disappearances in Kashmir. Lanham, Maryland & London, UK: Lexington Books.