Tamir Rice's Death

Submission 7,243

Part of a series on Police Brutality Controversies. [View Related Entries]

Overview

Tamir Rice was a 12 year-old boy in Cleveland who was killed November 23rd, 2014, while playing with a toy gun in a park, after the police responded to a 911 call where someone thought that the gun was real.

Background

Tamir Rice was a 12 year-old boy who lived near the Cudell Recreation Center in Cleveland, Ohio.^[1] He was 5'7" and 195 pounds, but he still had a childish appearance. After a nearby resident called 911 saying that someone who was "probably" a child and "probably" had a fake gun was walking around, pointing it at everyone and scaring them.^[2] However, it is likely that the police officers who responded to the call never heard that information.^[3]

Rookie Officer Timothy Loehmann, and his training partner Officer Frank Garmback, pulled into the park and up to Tamir. When he didn't run, nor respond to calls to drop his gun. Loehmann shot him in the abdomen within two seconds of arriving at the scene, and didn't administer first aid for four minutes after the shot was fired.^[4] Rice died by internal bleeding caused by the gunshot wound after being in the hospital for a day. The entire incident was caught on surveillance video, which was later released to the public.

Note: This video is graphic and may be disturbing to some viewers.

The gun was later discovered to be an airsoft gun, given to Rice by a friend, which was missing the orange tip it was usually sold with that would indicate it was a replica gun. In the weeks and months after Tamir's death, his face and story were often mentioned at protests of police brutality, often led by the Black Lives Matter movement, that also featured mentions of Eric Garner and Michael Brown.

Notable Developments

Samaria Rice Moves to Homeless Shelter

During the more than a year it took to determine whether charges would be filed in the case, Rice's mother, Samaria Rice, spoke in public many times about the situation and how she believed she was being treated by the police after they killed her son. In a court filing from May 4th, 2015, Samaria Rice claimed that the prolonged pace of the investigation was causing her family undue distress, including the need for them to relocate to a homeless shelter so as not to be near the place where Tamir was killed.^[5] She transitioned out of the shelter later that year after she received support from her family.^[6]

Grand Jury Refuses to Indict

On December 28th, 2015, the Grand Jury in Cuyahoga County decided against indictments for the officers involved in the shooting. The prosecutor, Tim McGinty, called the situation a "perfect storm of human error," and said that the officers could not have known that they weren't pulling up to a dangerous older man brandishing a real gun.^[7] The prosecutor said that he had informed Samaria Rice of the grand jury's decision before releasing it to the public; in return she released the following statement through her lawyer: ^[8]

“Prosecutor McGinty deliberately sabotaged the case, never advocating for my son, and acting instead like the police officers’ defense attorney. In a time in which a non-indictment for two police officers who have killed an unarmed black child is business as usual, we mourn for Tamir, and for all of the black people who have been killed by the police without justice.”

The lack of indictments led to a massive outcry both in the press and on social media. Protests in Cleveland shut down the highways there and continued for several days.