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Nation Mourns Tamir Rice Case as a ‘Catastrophic and Pernicious Miscarriage of
Patrolman Timothy Loehmann shot Tamir Rice within two seconds after confronting the child near a community centre November 2014.
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Officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback have said the gun looked real and urged Rice to raise his hands three times. “But this entire process was a charade”, said Rice’s mother, Samaria Rice, in a statement Monday evening.
Loehmann and Garmback will remain on restricted duty until the review is complete. It was missing the orange tip that is supposed to show that it is not a real weapon.
A local prosecutor in OH state, Tim McGinty, called the events that led to the death of Tamir Rice a “perfect storm of human error”.
The way Prosecutor McGinty has mishandled the grand-jury process has compounded the grief of this family. Loehmann fired at Rice within seconds of exiting the vehicle, and has since testified that he believed the toy pellet gun that Tamir was wielding was real.
One, Art Blakey, from Cleveland, said: “There never has been any justice in these police murders”.
Rice was shot by a Cleveland Police officer in November of a year ago after a 911 call informed Cleveland police that an individual was in a west side park with a gun or possibly a toy.
Also, the Cleveland police department reached a settlement with the US Justice Department earlier this year to overhaul the way it uses force and deals with the public.
The grand jury needs only to find that the evidence presents probable cause that a crime has been committed in order to indict a suspect, but Rice’s family claims McGinty seemed to be working explicitly to convince the grand jury of the officers’ innocence. It also demanded the officers be charged, a special prosecutor handle the case and the U.S. Justice Department investigate. However, the alleged gun that Tamir was holding turned out to be a toy.
“With his hands pulling the gun out and his elbow coming up, I knew it was a gun and it was coming out”, Loehmann said in a statement he read to the grand jury. McGinty said these errors “were substantial contributing factors to the tragic outcome”.
Now, an administrative hearing will now be held to determine if the officers violated any departmental policies during the shooting of the 12-year-old. Prosecutors argued that the officers’ actions were not criminal, since there was no way of telling whether the gun was real or not.
Assistant Prosecutor Matthew Meyer said it was “extremely difficult” to tell the difference between the pellet gun and a real one.
The Rice shooting came just days before a grand jury opted not to indict a white police officer who fatally shot unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in the St Louis, Missouri, suburb of Ferguson in August 2014. McGinty’s office released the results of the sheriff’s investigation in June, and months later presented the case to a grand jury. Life and death decisions are made every day by police officers across the country, but the benefit of the doubt is often given in the preservation of white lives while the presumption of guilt, dangerousness and suspicion, time after time, is reserved for black lives. Rice was shot dead by Loehmann as soon as the police’s vehicle stopped near Rice.
Both attorneys said the officers weren’t available for interviews because of a pending federal lawsuit filed by Tamir’s family against them and the city.
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“McGinty did say that he did make a recommendation [to the grand jury]”, says Schultze.