CLEVELAND, Ohio – The Justice Department on Tuesday officially closed the investigation into Tamir Rice’s shooting and declared that there was insufficient evidence to charge the police officers involved in the boy’s death.
Officials released a summary that explained the decision involving the 12-year-old boy’s death in 2014, stating that not enough evidence exists to bring charges of civil-rights violations or obstruction of justice.
“In sum, after extensive examination of the facts in this tragic event, career Justice Department prosecutors have concluded that the evidence is insufficient to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Officer [Timothy] Loehmann willfully violated Tamir Rice’s constitutional rights, or that Officers Loehmann or [Frank] Garmback obstructed justice,” the report said.
The report angered the boy’s mother, Samaria Rice.
“It’s a horrible feeling,” she said in an interview with cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer. “It really is. It continues to show how broken the system is.”
The release comes a month after Samaria Rice and attorneys for her family sharply criticized Justice Department officials and demanded to know why they failed to convene a grand jury.
The attorneys wondered why then-Attorney General William Barr refused to listen to prosecutors who had sought the secret panel and why officials failed to notify the boy’s family about that decision.
On Tuesday, the family’s attorney, Subodh Chandra, called the process tainted.
“The Rice family has been cheated of a fair process again,” Chandra said.
Loehmann shot Tamir at Cudell Recreation Center on Nov. 22, 2014, while the boy was playing with an airsoft pellet gun. He died the next day. Loehmann was a rookie officer and had been on the department for less than eight months. He was a passenger in a car driven by a veteran training officer, Frank Garmback.
The two officers responded to a report of someone pointing a gun at people outside the recreation center. The caller told a 911 dispatcher that the gun looked fake, but that information was never relayed to the officers.
In order to prove a civil-rights violation, the government would have needed to prove that Loehmann’s actions were unreasonable and willful, the report states.
The Justice Department explanation noted that officers are permitted to use deadly force when they believe a suspect poses an “imminent threat of serious physical harm, either to the officer or to others.”
Loehmann fired his weapon because “it appeared to him that Tamir was reaching for his gun,” the document said. To accuse Loehmann of the allegation, according to the report, prosecutors would need to show the boy was not reaching for his gun and that the officer “did not perceive that Tamir was reaching for his gun. … The evidence is insufficient for the government to prove this.”
The report also shows that prosecutors reviewed the evidence to determine whether they could prove that Loehmann and Garmback obstructed justice in their statements to law enforcement officers.
For prosecutors to file the charges, they would have needed to prove that the officers offered false statements to hinder a federal investigation.
The report stressed that the officers made several statements, including minutes after the shooting “without time to reflect, discuss or view video.
“Some of their statements are more detailed than others and with slightly different verbiage, but all of which were generally consistent, particularly on the seminal facts,” the summary states.
Loehmann was fired in 2017. He was dismissed not for his role in Tamir’s death but for lying on his application to join the department. Garmback was suspended 10 days, but an arbitrator reduced the suspension to five days. He remains on the force.
Cleveland settled a federal civil-rights lawsuit with the boy’s family for $6 million. A Cuyahoga County grand jury in 2015 declined to bring any charges.
Attempts to reach Henry Hilow, the attorney for the Cleveland Police Patrolmen’s Association, were unsuccessful.
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