Cleveland’s mayor admitted that he didn’t trust a state agency to investigate
the shοoting deαth of 12 year old Tamir Rice due to prior bunglings.
Tamir Rice was gunned down by officers while carrying a toy gun.
Mayor Frank Jackson explained on Sunday that he was hesitant to trust a state agency to review the fatαl shoοting due to a 2012 investigation involving two unarmed suspects who were shοt deαd by police.
“I don’t think the state attorney general handled the East Cleveland shoοting properly,” Jackson said, according to Cleveland.com. “It wasn’t done in a way that I think gave me confidence that this would have been done properly. So that’s why we turned to the county.”
That 2012 shoοting resulted in a six figure settlement to the two victim’s families and criminal charges against police.
“That’s part of our attempt to demonstrate transparency and have an outcome that will not be tainted by people believing that the police department is investigating itself,” Jackson explained.
Jackson was at first optimistic that the state could lead the investigation but later admitted that, because of the prior shoοting, he’d “lost confidence.”
“The releasing of information in that case was unprecedented for a criminal proceeding,” Jackson said at the time. “I don’t have confidence that a BCI probe into police use-of-force would be a transparent, due-process kind of investigation.”
Twelve year old Tamir Rice was gunned down by police within two seconds of them arriving on the scene.
Video from the scene also shows that police officer Timothy Loehmann, who shot Tamir, and his partner, Frank Garmback, did not administer first aid to the 12 year old. Medical aid was only administered after an FBI agent arrived on the scene.
Loehmann resigned from another police force after a supervisor described him as “distracted and weepy” and “emotionally immature”, a CNN report found.
