Monday, December 8, 2014

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Family of Boy Killed by Cleveland Officer to Pursue Criminal Case - New York Times




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Mother Describes Her Treatment by Police



Mother Describes Her Treatment by Police



Samaria Rice, the mother of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old black boy fatally shot by a white officer in Cleveland, described how she and her family were treated by the police just after the shooting.


Video by AP on December 8, 2014. Photo by Aaron Josefczyk/Reuters.





The mother of Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old African-American boy who was fatally shot by a rookie police officer last month in Cleveland, said Monday that she would press for the officer to be indicted on criminal charges.


In a telephone interview, the mother, Samaria Rice, 37, said the pellet gun that Tamir was holding when he was killed at a recreation center on Nov. 22 had been given to him to play with by a friend just minutes before the police arrived.


“It wasn’t his gun at all,” Ms. Rice said. “I don’t allow that type of thing at my house.”


Her son had just gone to the recreation center with his 14-year-old sister, who was inside when someone told her that there had been a shooting outside, Ms. Rice said. “My daughter ran outside, and police tackled her and put her in handcuffs and put her in the police car.”



When Ms. Rice arrived — two boys had come to her door and told her son had been shot — the police “never let me get to him,” she said. “They told me if I didn’t calm down, they were going to arrest me and put me in the back of the police car.”


A spokesman for the Cleveland police did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Ms. Rice’s statements.


The shooting enraged many people in Cleveland, which is majority black, who have long said that the city’s police officers use excessive force. The complaints of the residents echoed the findings last week of an 18-month Department of Justice investigation that found a pattern of “unreasonable and unnecessary use of force” by the city’s police.


Coming after the police shooting death of Michael Brown, 18, in Ferguson, Mo., and the choking death of Eric Garner, 43, in Staten Island, the killing of Tamir Rice has become another symbol to many in the African-American community, and others, of the lack of accountability of many police departments in the use of force against minorities.


The rookie Cleveland officer, Tim Loehmann, 26, shot Tamir Rice within two seconds of his patrol car’s arriving on the scene and pulling up next to the child. The Cleveland police said the boy, who had what turned out to be a replica gun that shoots small plastic pellets but looks like a semiautomatic pistol, was told to raise his hands, but instead reached to his waistband.


Surveillance video released two weeks ago showed that the shooting happened so fast that it was hard to see how any real warnings could have been issued to and understood by the boy.


Ms. Rice, in the interview, said the police had not apologized for shooting her son or even told her what happened. “I’m still waiting,” she said. “Nobody has knocked on my door and told me anything.”


A lawyer retained by the family over the weekend, Benjamin L. Crump, said the family still did not know who called 911. A lawsuit has already been filed, but he said the family’s priority is to get justice through the criminal courts.


“They want the police to be held criminally liable for killing their child,” Mr. Crump said. “That’s our first priority, to get this police officer indicted and convicted of killing their child. That’s what this family wants.”


Mr. Crump cited the disclosure of the officer’s personnel file from a suburban police department that he left after a starkly negative assessment two years ago had described him as emotionally unfit for police work, and which also said that he had suffered a “dangerous loss of composure” during firearms training.


“They found he was not mentally fit to be a police officer,” Mr. Crump said, who also represents the family of Mr. Brown. “The Cleveland Police Department, without reviewing his file, hired him. There are grave concerns about whether he should have ever been hired.”


Mr. Crump added that the police “are ill equipped to deal with children with toy guns at a playground,” and he suggested that fake or toy guns that look like real firearms should be outlawed. “The killing has to stop,” he said.









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