The Cleveland cop who killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice for playing with a pellet gun last year will not face criminal charges, an Ohio prosecutor announced Monday.
After all, said Cuyahoga County prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty, it was “indisputable” that Rice pulled the gun out of his waistband.
He also described the shooting as a “perfect storm of human error,” according to the New York Times, but insisted that no crime was committed.
There is nothing indisputable in the surveillance that has been circulating for more than a year other than officer Timothy Loehmann shot Rice within two seconds of them pulling up to him in the park on November 22, 2014.
And it’s also indisputable that the Cleveland Police Department hired Loehmann after he was fired by another police department who described him as not being fit for police work.
This is how Loehmann justified the shooting, according to ABC News.
Loehmann said the suspect “appeared to be over 18 years old and about 185 pounds.”
“The suspect lifted his shirt reached down into his waistband. We continued to yell ‘show me your hands.’ I was focused on the suspect,” Loehmann wrote. “Even when he was reaching into his waistband, I didn’t fire. I still was yelling the command ‘show me your hands.'”
Loehmann said the suspect “had been threatening others with the weapon and had not obeyed our command to show us his hands,” according to the statement. “He was facing us. This was an active shooter situation.”
“I had very little time as I exited the vehicle…I observed the suspect pulling the gun out of the waistband with his elbow coming up,” he wrote.
Video shows rice being shot in less than 2 seconds after car door opens.
Loehmann said he and his partner were still yelling “show me your hands.”
“With his hands pulling the gun out and his elbow coming up, I knew it was a gun and it was coming out,” he wrote. “I saw the weapon in his hands coming out of his waistband and the threat to my partner and myself was real and active.”
He said he fired two shots, aiming towards the gun in Rice’s hand, the statement said, based on “tap-tap” training.
The video contains no audio but there does not appear to have been enough time to say all they said they did.
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