Renee Good was shot last week amid a thicket of cell phones that recorded her killing and afforded instant communication for witnesses.
Records of police and emergency operators released late on Thursday contain fragmentary, confused and profane reports from the scene in south Minneapolis and the efforts of the city police to contend with a crisis not of their making. The documents – about 60 pages of 911 call transcripts and police and fire department incident reports – sketch the visceral shock of bystanders, reduced to dry transcripts and terse entries in the shorthand of the police scanner.
The calls to 911 began at 9.38am on January 7th, shortly after an Immigration and Customs and Enforcement (Ice) officer fired a gun into Ms Good’s maroon Honda Pilot as observers and protesters confronted federal agents. The frantic calls persisted for about an hour.
“There’s 15 Ice agents, and they shot her, like, ’cause she wouldn’t open her car door,” one caller said.
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“I witnessed it,” a separate caller told an operator. Asked if anyone was hit, she replied, after catching her breath, “Yes, bleeding.” The caller later said, “She tried to drive away, but crashed into the nearest vehicle that was parked.”
The caller said she saw blood all over the driver.
The dispatcher responded that “lots of help” was on the way. Another caller pleaded: “Send an ambulance please. Ambulance, please.”
When paramedics arrived at 9.42am, Good was in the driver’s seat, unresponsive, with blood on her face and torso, the records say. After they removed her from the vehicle, she was not breathing and had an irregular pulse.
She had two apparent gunshot wounds on the right side of her chest, another on her left forearm and a possible fourth on the left side of her head. Blood was flowing from her left ear, and her pupils were dilated, the fire department’s report said.
In an ambulance en route to the hospital, medics performed CPR on Ms Good. At about 10.30am, resuscitation efforts were stopped.
Jonathan Ross, who was identified as the Ice agent who shot Ms Good, was still on the scene, according to a report from the Minneapolis Police Department. About 15 minutes later, he was taken to a federal building.
One of the 911 calls came from a man who appeared to be calling for emergency assistance and local police on behalf of homeland security officers on the scene.
From there the terse communications among Minneapolis police and fire units recorded in incident reports released Thursday night tell the story.
At 9.47am: “Need crowd control and area blocked off.”
Three minutes later: “Crowd getting hostile.”
10.07am: “Contact who is in charge of Feds and have them leave the scene.”
But evacuating Ice was difficult, as the crowd became increasingly agitated. About 20 people tried to surround officers at one point, the records said.
11.01am: “Ice being surrounded.”
11.20am: “All Ice agents have left the scene.”
11.38am: “Crowd calmed down now that Ice has gone.”
Within an hour after, videos of the killing were being seen on cell phones around the world.
– This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
