Cleveland LEO Who Shot Tamir Rice Fired
The office that shot and killed Tamir Rice was fired today for lying on his job application. The officer failed to disclose his previous resignation in lieu of firing from a previous police force. Tamir Rice was fatally shot in 2014, the other officer involved was suspended and will require additional training after his suspension.
The Cleveland police officer who fatally shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice has been fired effective immediately, city officials told the news media on Tuesday.
The officer, Timothy Loehmann, had been on the force for less than a year before the 2014 shooting. He was placed on desk duty while an administrative review took place.
Loehmann’s partner Frank Garmback, who had been driving the police cruiser in the moments leading up to the shooting, has also been suspended without pay for 10 days.
“This has been tough on our entire community, and definitely on the Rice family,” Cleveland’s police chief, Calvin Williams, said at a news conference Tuesday.
“When this happened in 2014, I made the comment that this is of course a tragedy, but it’s even more tragic that it happened at the hands of a Cleveland police officer.”
City officials said in a disciplinary letter that Loehmann’s termination was due not to the Rice shooting but to inaccuracies on Loehmann’s application to the Cleveland police department, Williams said.
Loehmann had previously been hired as a police officer at Missouri’s Independence Police Department but was reportedly allowed to resign after a six-month probationary period.
His Independence supervisors deemed Loehmann’s job performance “dismal” and found that he could not “follow simple directions, could not communicate clear thoughts nor recollections,” and was “distracted” and “weepy” during firearms-qualification training, according to the personnel file reviewed by Cleveland.com.
A disciplinary letter from the Cleveland police department accused Loehmann of lying on his application regarding how his job in Independence ended.
The disciplinary action against both Loehmann and Garmback comes more than a year after Cleveland settled a wrongful-death lawsuit with the Rice family for $6 million.
Rice was fatally shot in November 2014 after Loehmann and Garmback were called to a Cleveland recreation center. They had received a report that a person with a gun was outside, but the 911 dispatcher did not tell the officers that the caller had said the gun was “probably fake” and that its owner was most likely a juvenile.
Security footage from outside the recreation center showed Loehmann and Garmback’s police cruiser skidding to a halt near Rice, at which point Loehmann opened the car door and began firing at Rice within seconds.
Only after the shooting did it emerge that Rice was 12 and had been playing with a plastic pellet gun that had its orange safety tip removed.
A grand jury declined in 2015 to indict both officers in Rice’s death.
Both the shooting and the lack of prosecutorial action prompted national outrage and protests over police use of force and racial bias in the criminal-justice system.
Steve
Steve is an affordable multifamily housing professional that is also the co-founder of Whiskey Congress. Steve has written for national publications such as The National Marijuana News and other outlets as a guest blogger on topics covering sports, politics, and cannabis. Steve loves whiskey, cigars, and uses powerlifting as an outlet to deal with the fact that no one listens to his brilliant ideas.
