The battle over the truth behind Renee Nicole Good's shooting persists after the federal government refused to cooperate with state and local authorities to investigate its own shooting by a federal agent. She's not the only one. The feds also tried to take over the shooting death of Alex Jeffrey Pretti.
What has unfolded in the weeks after is drawing attention to the false narratives coming out of the Department of Homeland Security. It's still unknown whether Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or Customs and Border Protection (CPB) officers on the ground lied to DHS or if DHS spun its own tale about what happened without speaking with the shooters. Over and over, DHS claims that officers were afraid for their lives.
The Daily Beast's Michael Daly pointed to a non-fatal shooting that is drawing further attention to officials who gave public statements after the incident.
Venezuelan Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis survived his ICE encounter, receiving only a shot to his leg. The story Noem concocted was that an incident with a food delivery driver constituted “an attempted murder of federal law enforcement.”
“Our officer was ambushed and attacked by three individuals who beat him with snow shovels and the handles of brooms,” she claimed.
But there was another bullet hole found in the front door of Sosa-Celis' home that points to two very different accounts. Two eyewitnesses said that they witnessed the federal agent fire his gun into the door.
It means "Sosa-Celis was struck after he entered the house, so he could not have constituted a threat. The bullet was later found to have torn through the door and into the apartment," the report said.
Attorney Frederick Goetz, who is representing Sosa-Celis' friend Alfredo Alejandro Aljorna, told the Beast that they found the bullet embedded “between a child’s bed and a crib."
Both children, ages 1 and 3, were in the home at the time the officer fired into the door.
A 911 call records Sosa-Celis and his wife, Indriany Mendoza Camacho, saying in Spanish, “They shot through the door."
She later gave a statement that Sosa-Celis wasn't even the person ICE had been chasing after for fleeing a car stop. Indeed, they were following Aljorna. Still, ICE drove her and the two children out with tear gas as they hid in an upstairs bedroom. All were arrested and taken out of state the following morning.
ICE then fired tear gas at the crowd that was gathering outside of the home.
While the cases to get the men back from a Texas detention facility were sealed by the court, The Minneapolis Star Tribune has seen them and the eyewitness accounts. They allege they saw "an unnamed ICE agent punch and choke Aljorna. Sosa-Celis sought to help his friend."
“Seeing Alfredo in danger, Julio intervened and attempted to separate Alfredo from the man beating him and choking him — pulling on Alfredo towards the house to get him away from his attacker,” a petition says. “At no time did either Alfredo or Julio use or threaten to use a weapon, nor wield any object that could be deployed as a weapon, against the man assaulting Alfredo.”
While they accused the two men of attacking them with a broom handle and shovel, those objects were never recovered by the agents to prove their case.
It was the same incident in which a family was driving home when ICE attacked their vehicle, throwing tear gas canisters under their car, flooding it with toxic chemicals, and deploying their airbags. It was at that point that their 6-month-old baby stopped breathing.
Since the incident, that family has been flooded with "threats and hateful messages," the AP said in a report at the time.
Another incident in Illinois involves Marimar Martinez, who was shot five times by agents and still managed to survive. In that case, her lawyer is still fighting against DHS for narratives he said are false and he can prove it.
Appearing on CNN, her lawyer, Christopher Parente, said that they are both clear-eyed that nothing they do or say will change President Donald Trump or his administration. What they do hope is that telling her story will expose the misinformation coming from DHS.
In her case, DHS claimed, again, that agents were afraid for their lives. The department alleged that their vehicle was boxed in by cars that were trying to attack them. The video Parente has shows a completely different story. There were construction cones to their right, no one in front of them, and Martinez was driving around them when they shot into her car as she drove away.
"Tricia McLaughlin [assistant secretary for public affairs] from DHS is still, to this day, putting out this testimony that these agents, these statements that these agents were boxed in, that they couldn't move," said Parente.
The story is repeated over and over. In Good's case, she ran into an officer with her car and he fired, afraid for his life. In Pretti's case, as the man lay on the ground, detained by several men, they were still afraid for their lives. A family was boxed in between protesters on their street, and somehow, officers were afraid for their lives and needed to deploy tear gas at them.
Claiming fear of death is a legal standard set by the U.S. Supreme Court case in 1989, in which officers must claim there was an “objectively reasonable” belief that, without their actions, there would be danger or harm to themselves or others. So, each example of federal officers' use of force will come with a similar defense from DHS.
