Tamir Rice died after being shot by a Cleveland police officer who mistook his BB gun for a real weapon. (Photos: AP/Getty)
Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty said a grand jury refused to indict a Cleveland police officer or his partner in the death of Tamir Rice, a black 12-year-old. McGinty said the grand jury, which had been meeting since mid-October, was faced with “indisputable” evidence that the boy drew a weapon before the police officer opened fire.
Patrolman Timothy Loehmann, a white police officer and rookie at the time, shot Rice as the cruiser driven by patrolman Frank Garmback came to a stop on Nov. 22, 2014. Rice, who was “waving around” a BB gun Loehmann mistook for a real handgun, died the next day during surgery. McGinty called the episode “a perfect storm of human error,” but underscored that no crime was committed.
“Viewing the video alone, however, provides an incomplete picture,” Assistant County Prosecutor Matthew Meyer said Monday.
Meyer noted that a witness who had been standing with Rice earlier in the day told authorities that Rice was pulling the gun out “like robbers do,” adding that a short, grainy video of the tragic encounter between Rice and the police was misleading. During a powerful moment during the press conference, Meyer actually held up the model of Rice’s airsoft gun next to the real weapon the BB gun was modeled after.
“To someone who is in a stressful encounter, however, who doesn’t know if the gun is real or fake, it is impossible to tell,” Meyer said.
Further, on the very same day Rice was shot by the police, a man waiting for a bus outside a recreation center called 911 to report that a male, who was likely a juvenile, was waving a gun and pointing it at people. The male caller did tell the 911 operator that the gun the person had probably wasn’t real, but the operator never passed that information to the dispatcher who gave Loehmann and Garmback the high-priority call.
In the video, Rice walked toward the cruiser as it moved toward him. The Rice family and their attorney, nevertheless, were not pleased with the grand jury decision. Subodh Chandra, a Cleveland attorney who represents the Rice family in a federal civil rights lawsuit over the shooting, said he had braced himself for the news that the white officers wouldn’t be indicted.
“This is apparently how long it takes to engineer denying justice to a family when the video of the incident clearly illustrates probable cause to charge the officer,” Chandra said.
While grand jury proceedings are supposed to be kept a secret–with good reason–McGinty released expert reports and investigative documents to the media and public citing his desire for transparency in how the case is being handled. Experts hired by McGinty concluded the shooting was justified. Unsurprisingly, experts hired by the Rice family concluded the opposite. Both sides testified before the grand jury, which argued with the experts put forward by McGinty.
