The U.S. justice department ended its civil rights investigation into the 2014 fatal shooting by the Cleveland police against Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old black youth, and said that no federal criminal charges would be brought in the case.
The announcement came five years after a grand jury in Ohio cleared two Cleveland police officers, Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback, of state charges of wrongdoing in Rice’s death, who was shot in a playground while holding a toy gun capable of firing lead.
The murder occurred when Loehmann fired his weapon twice at the young man in seconds, killing him. Both men are white.
The incident was one of several major killings of African Americans at the hands of US law enforcement in recent years, which fueled protests that sparked the Black Lives Matter movement against racial injustice.
The two officers in the Rice case were dispatched in response to an emergency call to 911 reporting a suspect with a gun near a recreation center.
But the crucial information the interlocutor gave to dispatchers – namely, that the person in question was a minor and that the alleged weapon could be a toy – was never passed on to Loehmann and his partner before arriving at the scene.
As a result, “the police believed they were responding to a playground where an adult man brandished a real weapon against individuals, presumably children,” said the justice department’s civil rights division in its six-page statement.
In addition, the security camera video of the November 2014 episode was considered too grainy and taken from a very long distance to conclusively detail the circumstances of the shooting, the statement said.
In closing the case without filing a complaint, the department said it lacked sufficient evidence to prove, beyond any reasonable doubt, that any of the policemen deliberately violated the law, rather than making a mistake or exercising an inappropriate judgment.
“Although the death of Tamir Rice is tragic … both the Civil Rights Division and the US attorney’s office have concluded that this matter is not a prosecutable violation of federal statutes,” the department said.
Although no criminal charges have been filed, the city has agreed to pay $ 6 million to the boy’s family to resolve a civil rights lawsuit filed for his death in April 2016.
Cuyahoga County prosecutors, who previously investigated the murder, said Rice intended to hand over the toy gun he was carrying – an Airsoft replica of a .45 caliber semi-automatic weapon – or show police that it was not real, but that the two cops had no way of knowing that.
Airsoft usually comes with an orange tip on its barrel to distinguish it from a real firearm, but the one Rice was holding did not have, prosecutors said.
The family’s lawyer, Subodh Chandra, said Tamir’s mother was deeply upset by Tuesday’s decision.
“Justice for the family would be to sue the police who killed their son,” said Chandra.