I don’t think suspect in yesterday’s confrontation with federal agents, woke up that day planning to get killed. I really don’t. What I do think is that she probably thought she was provoking them in a way that would end with her getting yanked out of the car, maybe shoved to the ground, detained, something ugly but non-lethal. The kind of thing that turns into a viral video where they get to play the victims and paint ICE as monsters. That’s a scenario people assume is safe, especially if they’ve been around activism long enough to believe the script always ends the same way.

If her girlfriend was already outside the vehicle filming, that tells me this wasn’t spontaneous panic. That looks like intent to capture a moment. Maybe they thought, “We’ll push, they’ll overreact, we’ll get content.” I’m sure she didn’t think she’d get shot. I’m sure she thought she was in control of the situation.

But then reality intervenes. Maybe she didn’t see the officer in front of the car. Maybe she had tunnel vision and was focused on the agent next to her. But she did accelerate forward, and once a vehicle is moving toward an officer, the situation changes instantly. At that point, whether she meant to or not, she put herself into a lethal scenario, and she lost her life.

That’s tragic. It’s also not the same thing as “this just happened for no reason.”

And if it turns out there’s evidence that this was coordinated… that the girlfriend was setting this up, encouraging it, orchestrating it to get a viral confrontation… then yeah, I think she should face charges too. Not just because someone died, but because if you help engineer a dangerous situation and someone ends up dead, you don’t get to wash your hands of it afterward.

Sympathy doesn’t mean pretending people had no agency. And accountability doesn’t mean saying someone deserved to die. Both things can be true at the same time.