Federal officials have taken control of the investigation into the shooting death of a Minneapolis woman by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, blocking a state law enforcement’s concurrent inquiry.
The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension said Thursday that it no longer has access to case materials, scene evidence or investigative interviews it needs to look into the fatal shooting of Renee Good. As a result, the agency said in a statement, the investigation will be led solely by the FBI.
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Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz criticized the decision to block state investigators’ access to case materials, saying that “Minnesota must be part of this investigation.”
“Now that Minnesota has been taken out of the investigation, it feels very, very difficult that we will get a fair outcome,” Walz said at a news conference Thursday. “And I say that only because people in positions of power have already passed judgment — from the president to the vice president, to [Homeland Security Secretary] Kristi Noem — have stood and told you things that are verifiably false, verifiably inaccurate. They have determined the character of a 37-year-old mom that they didn’t even know.”
Noem, however, said Thursday that state officials had no authority to investigate a shooting by a federal officer.
“They have not been cut out,” she said at a news conference. “They don’t have any jurisdiction in this investigation.”
Fatal shooting
Noem’s comments came a day after she described Good’s actions as “domestic terrorism” and said the officer who killed the woman was acting in self-defense.
Videos posted online rebut Noem’s depiction of the episode.
One widely circulated video shows a red SUV stopped at an angle on the road. It then shows a pickup truck with blue and red lights embedded into its front grill pulling up to the driver’s side of the vehicle. Two agents in tactical gear step out, order the driver out of the vehicle and try to open the SUV’s door. The driver reverses, angles her front wheels away from the agents at her driver’s side door and then pulls forward. A third agent at the front of the SUV fires at the driver. The SUV then crashes into a parked vehicle.
Local officials, witnesses at the scene and experts in police procedure said Good was no threat to the agents and the shooting was unjustified.
The FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Minnesota did not respond to a request for comment from Straight Arrow News.
The Minnesota police agency said Wednesday said it would conduct a joint investigation with the FBI and “responded promptly to the scene and began coordinating investigative work in good faith.”
Later that afternoon, the agency said, the FBI told its agents that the U.S. Attorney’s Office had “reversed course” and that the investigation will now be led “solely by the FBI.”
“Without complete access to the evidence, witnesses and information collected, we cannot meet the investigative standards that Minnesota law and the public demands,” the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension said. “As a result, the BCA has reluctantly withdrawn from the investigation. The BCA Force Investigations Unit was designed to ensure consistency, accountability and public confidence, none of which can be achieved without full cooperation and jurisdictional clarity.”
Walz said a special unit in the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension independently investigates use-of-force incidents involving law enforcement officers in Minnesota.
Without that inquiry, he said, it will be “very, very difficult for Minnesotans to think in any way this is going to be fair, when Kristi Noem was judge, jury and basically executioner yesterday. That’s very, very difficult to think that they were going to be fair.”
In a statement, the city of Minneapolis called federal authorities’ decision “deeply disappointing.”
“We are concerned that the investigation is proceeding without state partners, and we are calling for a clear and transparent process that includes state investigating agencies,” the statement said.
