American journalist and documentary filmmaker Brent Renault was killed in Irpin, Kyiv police chief said.
Reno, whose New York Times press pass and American passport were posted on social media, was a legendary filmmaker who covered some of the world’s worst human tragedies. The New York Times said in a statement that he was not on assignment and that their press pass with his name and photo was out of date.
It is reported by CBS News on Monday. that he confirmed that Renault was killed by Russian forces.
“Today, a 51-year-old correspondent of the world famous media was shot dead in Irpin,” wrote Andrey Nebytov, the head of the local police, on Facebook. “Another journalist has been wounded. Now they are trying to take the victim out of the combat zone. Of course, the profession of a journalist is a risk, but US citizen Brent Renault paid with his life for trying to emphasize the ingenuity, cruelty and ruthlessness of the aggressor.
Juan Arredondo, who was traveling with Reno at the time of the attack and was hospitalized with injuries, told the journalist that the two were trying to cross the bridge at Irpin to film the fleeing refugees when they were attacked by Russian troops at a checkpoint.
“We got into the car – someone offered to give us a lift to another bridge, and we crossed the checkpoint, and they [started] shooting at us,” said Arredondo. “So the driver turned around and they kept firing.”
He said he saw Renault get shot in the neck.
The journalist’s death came after several days of heavy street fighting in Irpin, a suburb about three miles from Kyiv, which left scores of civilians dead. It was in Irpen that the murdered bodies of a family of three, including a small child, were photographed by The New York Times, becoming a symbol of the world of horrors caused by Putin’s war.
Brent and his brother Craig, working under the pseudonym Renaud Brothers, have received several awards for their documentary work, including a Peabody Award and two Columbia DuPont Awards.
The brothers reported on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as natural disasters such as the earthquake in Haiti. He and his brother also covered political extremism in Egypt, Libya and across Africa.
One of the Reno brothers’ recent productions is Met Storm, about the drug crisis in Arkansas, where they grew up. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Brent explained why they were drawn to the topic.
“There is so much judgment and analysis about people who use drugs in our culture, on social media and on cable news. Our work was a reaction to this performance,” he said. “We tried to fit in places most people couldn’t go and let these characters open up to us and show context and empathy to their stories.”
Renault took risks from the beginning of his career to bring stories from the war zones to the public.
In 2013, he told Filmmaker magazine that when he had just graduated from college, he funded a trip to Cambodia and got interviews with the CEO of two rival prime ministers.
“On the first day of filming, I ended up in the wrong area of town with the wrong players and nearly died when the car I was in drove through a military checkpoint, causing soldiers to fire on the car,” he said. “Another time I got on a motorbike with an interpreter and rode into the jungle to interview a villager I managed to arrange. What I didn’t understand was that the person I was supposed to interview lived in a village still controlled by the Khmer Rouge, the violent communist rebels who were responsible for killing a third of the country’s entire population in the 1970s.
“Things got so bad that a well-armed military was needed—thankfully organized by a general I became friends with at the beginning of the trip.”
He told the magazine that he and his brother were in Cairo covering the crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood.
“Just pulling video cameras out onto the streets to document the demonstrations was impossible to do safely,” he said. “Twice we were attacked by thugs who did not want the brutal tactics of the military to be witnessed by the international media.”