I woke up already tired of the news, the kind of tired that settles in your chest before your feet even touch the floor.
Not just tired of headlines, but tired of the way tragedy has become a routine scroll.

And then I read about Renee Nicole Good, and it felt like the air left the room.

Renee was thirty-seven years old.
A mother.
A poet.

A woman who loved her children loudly and creatively, the kind of love that leaves fingerprints everywhere.

The kind of mom who makes art with her kids even if it gets messy, even if paint ends up on the table, the couch, the floor, and somehow the ceiling.

The kind of mom who doesn’t apologize for joy.

She wrote poetry.
Not the neat, distant kind, but the kind that bleeds truth onto the page.
The kind you write when you’re trying to make sense of life and heartbreak and beauty all at once.

Her family said she led with compassion first.

Compassion first.
That phrase keeps echoing when you think about the way her life ended.
Because some endings are not just sad, they are infuriating.

That morning, Renee was doing what parents do every day.
She was moving through routine, the invisible labor of motherhood that holds everything together.
Getting kids ready, making sure shoes are on the right feet, backpacks are zipped, lunches are remembered.

She had already dropped off her youngest son at school.
Six years old.
Six.

That is the age where children still believe the world is mostly safe.
The age where they run ahead without looking back because they assume you will always be there.

The age where goodbye is just a pause, not a possibility of forever.

Renee said goodbye like any mom does.
Probably reminding him to be good, to listen, to have a great day.

Probably thinking about what needed to happen next, what errands were left, what to make for dinner, what bills were due, what laundry needed folding.

And then, within moments, everything changed.

Renee was inside her car during a federal ICE operation in Minneapolis.
What should have been a normal drive turned into a scene of fear and confusion.
Agents surrounded her vehicle.

Later, body camera footage and bystander video showed shots being fired into her car.
Renee was struck multiple times.
She did not survive.

When the word “survive” enters a story like this, it usually belongs to someone else.

Survive the day.
Survive the grief.
Survive the news being delivered in a single sentence that splits a family in two.

Renee was a United States citizen.
She was not a violent criminal.

She was not a threat.

That matters because the world will try to rewrite her into something easier to dismiss.
It always happens.
People search for reasons, for flaws, for anything that can make them feel like it could never happen to someone like them.

Her family says Renee was likely terrified.
Anyone would be.
Being surrounded by armed agents while sitting in your car is not a moment you can rationalize away.

Fear does things to a body.

It makes your heart race and your hands tremble.
It makes you think of your children even if they aren’t in the car with you.

Her mother described her as extremely compassionate, loving, forgiving, and affectionate.

An amazing human being.
Not the kind of person who would ever harm anyone.

Now her children are left without their mother.
Three children who will grow up carrying this absence like a weight.

A fifteen-year-old daughter who will have to grow up too fast.
Because oldest children do that in grief.
They become the second adult in the house without anyone asking them to.

A twelve-year-old son who will carry questions that have no answers.
Questions that will rise up during quiet moments and ruin ordinary days.
Questions he will ask at night when the world goes still.

And a six-year-old boy who said goodbye to his mom that morning and never saw her again.
That part is unbearable because it is so ordinary and so brutal at the same time.

A goodbye that should have meant “see you later” becoming the last thing he ever said to her.

There is a particular kind of cruelty in that.
The way life does not warn children.

The way it doesn’t give them time to understand what is happening.

Friends remember Renee as gentle and creative.
A woman who loved writing poetry and spending time with her kids.
Someone who found beauty in words and connection.

Someone who mattered deeply to the people who knew her.
Someone who had a place in the world that cannot be replaced.

It’s easy for a headline to turn a person into a sentence.
One line.
One label.
One “incident.”

But Renee was a whole life.
A whole heart.
A whole voice.

She was the mom who made crafts and let the mess happen because the mess was proof of living.
She was the mom who believed in imagination.
She was the mom who knew that creativity is one of the ways children feel safe and seen.

And she was a poet, which means she was someone who noticed things.
The way light falls in a kitchen window.
The way laughter echoes down a hallway.
The way sadness changes the shape of a day.

Poets pay attention.
And mothers pay attention.
Renee was both.

So when her story became public, people gathered.
Vigils were held.
Candles were lit.

Because sometimes, in a world that moves too fast, the only thing people can do is stop and say a name out loud.
To insist that the person who died was more than a statistic.
To insist that she deserves humanity.

And people said her name: Renee Nicole Good.
They said it because too often women like Renee get reduced to narratives that erase who they really were.
Reduced to “a woman” or “a suspect” or “a casualty,” as if her life didn’t have color and history and laughter.

But her life had all of that.
It had children’s artwork.
It had poetry.

It had routines and jokes and probably frustrations, too, because real people are not perfect.
Real people are tender and tired and trying their best.
And Renee’s family says compassion was her first instinct.

That is what makes this story so heavy.
Because it is not just about death.
It is about loss paired with confusion and outrage.

Questions will follow this case.
Questions about what happened inside those moments when agents surrounded her car.
Questions about why shots were fired into the vehicle.
Questions about whether it could have been avoided.

Those questions matter because accountability matters.
Because the truth matters.
Because three children will grow up needing to understand what took their mother away.

But even before every question is answered, there is one truth that stands on its own.
Renee deserved to live.
Her children deserved their mother.

And the world deserves a system where mothers dropping kids off at school do not end up dead in their cars.
Where ordinary life is not transformed into tragedy in seconds.
Where families are not left to pick up pieces that should never have been shattered.

I am over this, the narrator inside my own head kept saying.
Over families being torn apart.
Over children paying the price.

Over grief becoming routine.
Over compassion becoming an afterthought.

Over people arguing about what someone “should have done” while ignoring what should never have happened in the first place.
Over the way pain becomes political, as if sorrow can be debated.

Over the way we move on too quickly because moving on is easier than sitting with the truth.
But the truth doesn’t stop being true just because we scroll past it.

Renee Nicole Good deserved to live.
She deserved to drive home.
She deserved to pick up her son from school that afternoon.

She deserved to return to her other children and hear about their day.
She deserved to write more poems.
She deserved to grow older.

She deserved mornings that weren’t stolen from her.
She deserved years.
She deserved ordinary.

Instead, her children will grow up with a silence where her voice used to be.
A silence that shows up at graduations and birthdays and milestones.
A silence that will never fully go away.

And yet, her love remains.
It remains in the way people remember her.
In the stories her friends tell.

In the poems she left behind.
In the creative spirit she planted in her kids.
In the way compassion shaped her, even when life was hard.

Her family will keep her alive in the only ways they can.
By saying her name.
By refusing to let her be reduced to a headline.

By telling the world that she mattered.
That she was gentle.
That she was loving.

That she was not a threat.
That she was a mother who had just dropped off her six-year-old son at school.
That she was a poet, and her words deserved more time.

Somewhere in Minneapolis, there are people who will never forget that morning.
People who saw the videos.
People who watched candles flicker at vigils.

People who stood in crowds and felt the same thing: the air leaving the room.
The sense that something has gone terribly wrong in the world.

Renee’s story is not just a story of death.
It is a story of motherhood, creativity, and loss.
It is a story of what happens when force meets an ordinary life.

It is a story that must be told with humanity.
Not excuses.
Not cold language.

Because the point is not just what happened.
The point is who she was.

Renee Nicole Good.
Thirty-seven.
A mother.

A poet.
A woman whose compassion was not a performance, but a way of living.
A woman whose children loved her and depended on her.
A woman who should still be here.

Rest in love, Renee.
You are remembered.
You mattered.

And your children deserve a world that learns something from your loss, instead of simply absorbing it as another day’s news.