UPDATE: Headline has been revised from original “Cleveland Police Charged Tamir Rice” after
this Cleveland.com article.
It took two seconds for a Cleveland police officer to shoot and kill 12-year-old Tamir Rice for playing with a pellet gun, claiming he was in fear for his life.
It took another week for police to charge the boy with “aggravated menacing” and “inducing panic,” according to documents published today by the Daily Kos.
But even six months after the controversial shooting that was captured on surveillance video last November, investigators have yet to interview the cop who shot and killed him, a man named Timothy Loehmann who has a history of emotional instability and disciplinary problems.
A man who should have never been hired.
However, that hasn’t stopped Loehmann and his partner, Frank Garmback, from asking a judge to delay a lawsuit filed by Rice’s family until after the “pending investigation” is complete.
Not that they’re doing anything to help that investigation along, refusing to speak to investigators about it.
Nevertheless, the Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Office, which is handling the investigation, says it is almost done.
According to CNN:
Sheriff Clifford Pinkney provided what he said was a timeline of the investigation, which his department took over in December before beginning its investigation “in earnest” in mid-February. He told reporters that he and his investigators had resolved to leave “zero stones unturned” when the investigation is handed to prosecutors.
The Gray family’s legal team criticized what it said was the torpid pace of the investigation and said the drawn-out process is fueling suspicions that a coverup is in the works.
“It’s been now spanning three seasons, going up on 6 months, and sometimes justice requires just a little more diligence,” family attorney Walter Madison said. “What can be taking so long when you have the entire event there on video? A crime fighter’s dream.”
It is obvious that investigators are doing their usual coverup to protect themselves from any liability, trying to paint Rice as a dangerous menace to society when he was just a kid playing with a toy gun.
The real menace was the cop they hired, as Cleveland.com reported two weeks after the shooting.
A Nov. 29, 2012 letter contained in Tim Loehmann’s personnel file from the Independence Police Department says that during firearms qualification training he was “distracted” and “weepy.”
“He could not follow simple directions, could not communicate clear thoughts nor recollections, and his handgun performance was dismal,” according to the letter written by Deputy Chief Jim Polak of the Independence police.
The letter recommended that the department part ways with Loehmann, who went on to become a police officer with the Cleveland Division of Police.
“I do not believe time, nor training, will be able to change or correct the deficiencies,” Polak said.
Loehmann was forced to resign from the Independence Police Department in December 2012. He was then hired by the Cleveland Police Department in March 2014, which claims they never reviewed his personnel file, essentially placing the public at risk by handing him a badge and a gun.
Seconds after he shot Rice, his partner, Garmback, tackled the boy’s 14-year-old sister, who was running towards her brother, handcuffing her before stuffing her in the back of a patrol car.
Meanwhile, both cops did nothing to save the boy’s life.
