Wrong women's images associated with Minnesota ICE shooting victim online
- Published on January 9, 2026 at 20:48
- 3 min read
- By Bill MCCARTHY, AFP USA
After the victim in a fatal shooting by a US immigration agent in Minnesota was identified as 37-year-old mother Renee Nicole Good, X users raced to surface photos of the woman. But among the images spreading online are photos of two unrelated women, Gabriela Szczepankiewicz and Renee Paquette.
"This is Renee Nicole Good, a dedicated wife and mother who was killed by Donald Trump's ICE thugs today," says a January 7, 2026 post sharing a picture of a woman with short, dyed hair and an olive green sweater.
The image rocketed across X and other platforms, including Facebook and Threads, after Good was hit at point-blank range in Minneapolis as she apparently tried to drive away from masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents who were crowding her vehicle. The January 7 incident came as US President Donald Trump surged immigration agents to the city.
Some of the posts sharing it offered condolences for Good, and the same picture was even pasted on a protest sign in Chicago calling for "justice."
At the same time, right-wing X users supportive of the ICE agent placed the individual's photo in mocking memes and used artificial intelligence to generate new images that experts said dehumanized and sexualized her.
Some of the fabrications included fakes that undressed the woman, using a new edit function within Elon Musk's AI tool Grok that has triggered international alarm. Others portrayed her as a fountain with water pouring out of a hole in her neck and depicted her lying with her neck under the knee of an agent in a scene reminiscent of the 2020 police killing of Black man George Floyd.
But the person in the photo and depicted in the AI-enabled posts is not Good, whose real photo was published by outlets including the Minnesota Star Tribune (archived here).
The mistaken individual is a writer named Gabriela Szczepankiewicz.
The mix-up appears to have occurred because Szczepankiewicz and Good are mentioned -- and have their photos featured -- in an April 1, 2020 Facebook post from the Old Dominion University English department (archived here). The post announced the winners of that year's College Poetry Prize, with Szczepankiewicz earning an undergraduate honorable mention and Good's entry named the undergraduate winner.
The post refers to Good as Renee Macklin. Good had previously been married to Timmy Ray Macklin Jr, who died in 2023, according to the Star Tribune.
Old Dominion University's president said in a January 7 statement that Good, whom he referred to as "Renee (Macklin) Good," graduated in December 2020 with a degree in English (archived here).
A 2024 YouTube video conversation between Szczepankiewicz and Old Dominion University senior lecturer Anders Nolan says Szczepankiewicz graduated in 2021 with a degree in creative writing and English (archived here). A website that published Szczepankiewicz's poem also listed her at the time as a student at the school (archived here).
'Wrong Renee'
Other posts on social media -- including one from an account that previously spread misinformation about a shooting at Brown University -- claimed to show photos of Good with her children.
But the woman in those pictures is actually Renee Paquette, a former WWE wrestler, who commented under one post with a clarification: "Wrong Renee. My condolences to her family" (archived here).
One photo, which shows Paquette kneeling while her daughter hugs her, was originally posted to her Instagram in a 2023 message celebrating International Women's Day (archived here). The other image of Paquette kissing her daughter's cheek was shared in 2024 (archived here).
Read more of AFP's reporting on misinformation surrounding the Minnesota shooting here.
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