My Childhood Friend, Renee Good

I grew up with Renee Good – Renee Ganger, as I knew her. We lived in Colorado Springs; she was two years older than me. We went to church together; our parents were in a home group together, and we spent many Sunday afternoons playing in various basements and backyards while the grownups talked. We listened to Backstreet Boys. We jumped on her parents’ trampoline. We were in youth group together, the strange and frenetic evangelical youth group of the early 2000s.

After high school, we completely lost touch. I moved away for college, and she stayed in Colorado Springs. I hadn’t seen Renee in almost twenty years; all I knew about her life was that she had several children and no longer lived in Colorado Springs. Then one day, my computer screen was full of headlines about a woman who had been fatally shot by an ICE agent; I read one article, and it seemed like no one knew much yet, so I closed the computer.

The next morning, my brother texted me: The woman shot by ICE in Minn was Renee Ganger. I opened my computer and saw a flood of pictures: professional photos of Renee, smiling and pretty in a dark-red formal dress; iPhone snaps of Renee sitting in the front seat of a burgundy minivan; blurry stills of Renee’s face through a windshield… I stopped there. She looked exactly the same.

“The evil that men do lives after them / the good is oft interred with their bones,” Marc Antony says over the body of Caesar in Shakespeare’s play, and whether he means it ironically or not, he’s right: people are reduced, in their deaths, to a few details, a few sharp lines. When someone dies like Renee did, in the middle of a political conflagration, the lines are extra sharp, extra crude. One headline screams that Renee was a domestic terrorist, while another proclaims her a martyr. All that’s left of a person is a few seconds, a few scraps of information, a single moment that the political machine tears to pieces, looking to extract whatever it can use to gain more power over people’s imaginations.

When I shared on X that I knew Renee and asked people to show respect because she was a real person, not a political symbol, the response surprised me. I’ve had my share of run-ins with the ugly side of the internet, but it still shocked me to see how quickly the responses degenerated. It took only a few minutes for someone to chime in with, “Yeah Hitler had childhood friends too,” and soon after that, I got, “Congratulations, you’re friends with a domestic terrorist.” I suspect many of the inflammatory responses are from bots – whether they’re simply engagement farming or foreign agents, I can’t say – but certainly not all.

It is appalling to see how quickly human beings are willing to assume the worst about another human being. It is also appalling – and clarifying – to see how many people abandon their beliefs to follow partisan politics. I could go on about that, but what I’d like to do here is simply tell you about Renee, because I believe that the only remedy to what we’re facing right now as a nation is humanization, the restoration of the belief that every single human life is unique and valuable and worth protecting.

When we were both children in Colorado Springs, Renee lived on the other side of town from us, and she attended public school, while I was homeschooled – little quirks of fate that so often determine how close friends will be. Renee and I were together in the youth group almost every Sunday evening for years. We traveled with our youth group to Northern Ireland on a missions trip in 2006; I have a photo of us all, Renee and I sitting beside each other on the grass, framed against the gray North Atlantic.

Renee (left) with the author (right). Photo courtesy of the author.

Here’s what I remember about Renee: she was gentle and thoughtful, very much so. She was, even as a teenager, a remarkably careful listener. Even during high school – years when many of us turn inward and become self-obsessed – Renee persisted in looking out for others. She had beautiful light-blue eyes, and the rare ability to look directly into another’s eyes while they spoke. 

She had a beautiful voice, too, both singing and speaking. Her speaking voice was a little husky, but when she sang, it was clear and sweet. I have a distinct memory of standing in our newly completed youth group room one Sunday evening – it must have been winter because it was dark outside – singing praise and worship songs. We were Presbyterian, so we weren’t particularly good at singing praise and worship, but I remember Renee’s voice coming through, confident and lovely, carrying the rest of us.

Like I said, I hadn’t kept in touch with Renee. The news of her death didn’t hit me as a personal grief. That word “grief” is a powerful one, and there are many people who are feeling personal grief for Renee. I’m not able to say I’m one of them; that would not be fair to the people who are, in fact, personally grieving her loss.

However, in the days since, the shock I felt at seeing her smiling face over headlines has changed into grief of a sort, and anger, and above all, confusion: confusion that this girl I knew, this quiet, gentle, soft-spoken young woman who I grew up with, had become a figure, a trope, a weapon wielded by two warring parties.

When I started writing this piece, Renee’s name was top-line news. But apparently we have an unlimited appetite for horrors these days; since then, Renee has been displaced and the name “Alex Pretti” is on everybody’s lips. I didn’t know Alex, but I hope the people who did know him take the time to write about him, to remind us all that he was a distinctive, irreplaceable individual, who was once a child and might have grown into an old man. The same thing is happening to him now that happened to Renee: a life, rich and detailed and utterly unique, is being reduced to a few sharp points that will be wielded like knives.

In the days after Renee’s death, I started texting with some other young women from high school, women I hadn’t spoken to in years but who also knew Renee, some of them much better than I did. We shared photos and stories and memories. We’ve all grown in our different ways. One moved to Europe. One still lives in Colorado Springs. Some don’t go to church at all; some joined different Christian traditions; some still occasionally attend the church we grew up in. Some are conservative; some are progressive; some don’t really care about politics but worry about what’s happening in our country. I found myself wishing I’d kept in better touch with them all. Every single one of these people I knew twenty years ago is a complete person, a whole entire soul that is precious to God, and I have been confronted by the reality that it is an honor – a profound blessing and privilege – to have known them.

I don’t know what happened in the moments leading up to Renee’s death. I can’t watch the videos, and even if I could, from what I have seen online there are plenty of ways to interpret what is there. But I do know this: over the past few weeks Renee’s death has reconnected some of us. It has pushed us to bridge gaps, to try to understand each other. It continues to drive us to better understand and cherish each other. To listen to each other, as she did in life.

Requiescat in pace, Renee.