DENVER — Renee Good loved sparkles and laughter and any excuse for a celebration. She loved pretty much everyone she met, and was late for pretty much everything.
"She had this way of making you feel special and loved that I didn't even understand that until we lost her," Donna Ganger said Friday of her daughter, who was shot and killed by an immigration officer during the federal crackdown in Minneapolis.
She was “slow to anger, quick to love, quick to care,” said her father, Tim Ganger. “That's the essence of who she was.”
Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was shot and killed Jan. 7 as immigration agents surged through the Minneapolis area, sparking waves of protests. Her death and that of another U.S. citizen, Alex Pretti, just weeks later sparked outrage across the country and calls to rein in immigration enforcement.
Good's parents and two of her brothers, Brent and Luke Ganger, met AP journalists Friday in Denver for a long interview.
“It’s going to be hard in the future,” Donna Ganger said. “It’s going to be kind of a constant pain.”
Good, who graduated from college later in life, was volunteering in a local school district and working as a substitute teacher when she was killed, her parents said.
“She was working so hard to get her education, and then she was finally able to use it, and I could just tell how happy she was and how fulfilled,” Donna Ganger said.
Her family said they hoped her death, and how they spoke about her life, would help inspire change in a polarized country.
The family is “a very American blend,” Luke Ganger said in testimony to Congress. “We vote differently, and we rarely completely agree on the finer details of what it means to be a citizen of this country.”
Yet “we have always treated each other with love and respect,” he said.
Perhaps, they said Friday, they can inspire others to get along.
“Our purpose through this whole tragic, difficult, unbelievable time, is to have something good come out of this," Tim Ganger said. “Otherwise the senselessness of this is overwhelming.”
The family didn't want to discuss the specifics of their differences, but Donna Ganger said she'd long prayed for guidance: “Before all this happened I said ‘Make me a wise woman.’"
“Sometimes I’m just silly, you know, and I joke with them and I’m goofy,” she said, sadness echoing in her voice. “But I want to be able to talk about hard things — and that’s hard sometimes with your own family to talk about hard things that maybe you don’t agree on. And I don’t want there to be any hardships between us or hurt.”
“But it’s important that we learn to be careful with our words, but share them in a deep way,” she said. “It’s really important.”
On the morning of the shooting, as immigration raids and protests were flaring across the city, Good's partner, Becca Good, has said they had stopped their car in the street to support neighbors during an immigration operation.
Video shows Renee Good in a red SUV blocking part of the road and repeatedly honking her horn.
Two immigration officers get out of a truck and one orders Good to open her door. She reverses briefly, then turns the steering wheel as the officer says again, “get out of the car.” Almost simultaneously, Becca Good, standing in the street shouts, “drive, baby, drive!”
When Good begins pulling forward, an ICE officer standing in front of the vehicle pulls his weapon and fires at least two shots into the car, killing Good.
Good, her 6-year-old son and her partner — the women were not legally married, according to a family lawyer, but referred to one another as wives — had only recently relocated to Minneapolis from Kansas City, Missouri, settling a quiet residential street in a tight-knit neighborhood known for its activism.
In social media accounts, Good described herself as a “poet and writer and wife and mom.” A profile picture posted to Pinterest shows her smiling and holding a young child against her cheek, along with posts about tattoos, hairstyles and home decorating.
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