A WHITE police officer in the United States has shot and killed a 13-year-old black boy after the teenager allegedly pulled out a pellet gun, in a killing with unavoidable echoes of the Tamir Rice case out of Cleveland.
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According to the police, Tyre King allegedly pulled the BB gun from his waistband, and an officer mistook it for a lethal firearm, shooting the boy multiple times.
In a press conference Thursday morning, chief of police Kim Jacobs said that King’s replica gun looked “practically identical” to the pistol.
But the reality is that many “toy” guns today – BB guns and the newly popular Airsoft guns – are made to resemble real handguns.
“But as you can see, it looks like a firearm that could kill you”.
The police force said officers were called to a report of an armed robbery in east Columbus at about 7.45 p.m. and the male victim told them that a group of people approached him and demanded money and one of them had a gun. They have prompted sharp debates about race and policing, intense criticism of the police and, in some cases, civil unrest. Two fled to a nearby alley, and police followed, resulting in King pulling what appeared to be a real gun on the officers.
Mason, the officer who shot Tyre, has fatally shot someone while on duty before. Tyre died at a local children’s hospital.
How exactly King acted before he was shot dead is not known at the moment, the family said, and called for an independent investigation. His superiors cleared him of any wrongdoing in that episode. Evidence will automatically be presented to a grand jury to determine if the officer’s actions were justified or if charges are warranted. In 2012, while responding to a 911 call at a Columbus home, he fatally shot an armed man, Weiner said. He said the family believed Tyre being involved in an armed robbery would be “out of character”.
“Any loss of life is tragic, but the loss of a young person is particularly hard”, Mayor Andrew Ginther said.
The male who had been with Tyre was interviewed and released pending further investigation, police said. “We robbed somebody, the people I was with”, Braxton said, according to the Dispatch.
As athletes in schools and in professional leagues around the USA have increasingly – many are taking a knee as “The Star-Spangled Banner” is sung at games and matches, to protest police violence and racial inequality – the Columbus football team’s pledge is a different way to express pride in one’s freedoms.
“That’s unacceptable. We as a community need to come to grips with the fact, with such easy access to guns, whether they’re firearms or replicas, there’s something wrong in this country and it’s bringing its epidemic to our city streets”. He says they did, but then Tyre got up and ran and was shot, the paper reported Friday.
It comes almost two years after 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot dead by a police officer in Cleveland, Ohio, while holding a pellet gun.
“The family is obviously distraught by the murder of Tyre”, attorney Chanda L Brown said in the statement, which described him as a typical 13-year-old boy who was active in football, soccer, hockey and gymnastics.
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The police chief says it was too soon to draw comparisons between Tyre’s death and the Tamir Rice case.
