Minnesota state and city leaders are calling for the FBI to allow the Minnesota BCA to coordinate with its investigation involving an ICE agent who shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis.
Drew Evans, superintendent of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA), said his agency had initially sought to investigate Wednesday’s shooting of 37-year-old Renee Good in collaboration with the FBI.
On Thursday, however, Evans said the U.S. Attorney’s Office had “reversed course” and planned to have the FBI investigate alone.
Local leaders are now requesting that the BCA be brought back into the fold and be allowed to collaborate with the FBI on the investigation.
Mayor Jacob Frey accused federal leaders of already concluding what happened.
“The fact that Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice and this presidential administration has already concluded those facts is deeply concerning,” Frey said. “The facts that, from the very beginning, they’re calling the victim a domestic terrorist. They’re calling the actions of the agent involved as some form of defensive posture. We know they have already determined much of the investigation, and even if they haven’t, there is the appearance that there is some conclusion drawn from the very beginning.”
Frey argued that including the Minnesota BCA in the process would ensure a “fair investigation” into what happened.
“Include local experts in the process, we’ve got nothing to hide from here,” Frey said. “All we want here in Minneapolis is justice and the truth.”
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty emphasized that BCA investigators are impartial and do not make any recommendation to prosecutors when they submit their completed case files. Without collaboration from the FBI, they worried the BCA would be unable to meet the evidential standards required to even present a case file.
“Our goal must be to ensure that a thorough investigation is completed at the local level so that our community can have transparency,” Moriarty said. “We do not yet know if there will be sufficient evidence without the FBI case file to even make a charging decision.”
Ellison encouraged anyone with evidence of the shooting to submit photos or videos to an online portal for collection by the BCA.
On Thursday, Governor Walz said that barring state agencies from the investigation will make it harder for Minnesotans to trust the FBI’s findings when the investigation concludes.
“I think it’s very clear to everyone…that it feels now that Minnesota has been taken out of the investigation, it feels very, very difficult that we will get a fair outcome,” he said.
“It’s very difficult for Minnesotans to believe [the investigation] is going to be fair when Kristi Noem was the judge, jury, and basically executioner yesterday,” he added.
During a news conference on Thursday, Kristi Noem said the BCA does not have the “jurisdiction” to investigate the shooting.
An FBI expert told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS off-camera that cases involving federal agents are typically handled as joint investigations with state authorities.
