This weekend, we may have gotten the clearest picture to date on how Tamir Rice died last winter in a Cleveland park. Late Saturday, Cuyahoga County prosecutor Tim McGinity released a detailed report on an investigation that the Cuyahoga County sheriff conducted into the 12-year-old’s shooting.
Read the report here. It confirms that police officer Tim Loehmann’s actions were completely inexcusable. While the report makes no recommendation as to whether Loehmann and his partner and trainer, Frank Garmback, should face charges, it does point out that Loehmann opened fire on Tamir within two seconds of arriving on the scene.
According to the report, no witnesses heard Loehmann give a verbal warning to Tamir before opening fire. At least one witness suggested that Loehmann only gave a warning after cutting Tamir down. Apparently due to those conflicting accounts, the investigators wrote that it was “unclear” whether Loehmann gave any warning beforehand. But as most of us know, it is physically impossible to give a warning in that time frame before opening fire. And it would have been physically impossible for Tamir to have dropped his pellet gun in that time.
According to the report, Tamir got no medical assistance until an FBI agent who is also a paramedic came on the scene. The agent noticed that Tamir took awhile to respond due to “an incredibly disturbing looking injury.” When Tamir came to, he said that he’d been shot. As you may recall, one factor in a Cleveland judge’s recommendation that a prosecutor file criminal complaints against Loehmann and Garmback was that neither officer tried to help Tamir for four minutes, even though it was obvious that Tamir was gravely injured.
Normally, a prosecutor doesn’t release reports about investigations into police misconduct before turning them over to the grand jury for its own deliberations. However, McGinity said that he felt there needed to be “an intelligent discussion” about this case so “needed changes in use of force policy, police training and leadership” can be implemented as quickly as possible. Call me optimistic, but it sounds like this prosecutor may be making a pretty loud suggestion to a police department with whom he deals on a regular basis–it needs to make the changes it agreed to make when it settled with the Justice Department, make them fast, and make them lasting.
Walter Madison, one of the Rice family’s attorneys, thinks there’s another factor at play–McGinity may have been trying to diffuse criticism for not acting on Judge Ronald Adrine’s finding that there was probable cause to arrest Loehmann and Garmback. Madison claimed that when a private citizen is involved, a prosecutor almost always acts on a similar recommendation from a judge in short order.
To my mind, this report confirms? that Loehmann and Garmback’s actions were not only inexcusable, but criminal. At the very least, there’s enough to support the charges of negligent homicide and dereliction of duty against both officers, and you can make a pretty convincing argument for the charge of reckless homicide against Loehmann as well. We can only hope that this prosecutor will act on the recommendation to arrest Loehmann and Garmback–and that the grand jury will ensure these two officers answer for what they did that day.
