In 2014, Tamir Rice was gunned down by Cleveland police. He was an unarmed black boy, only 12 years old.
Today it was announced that the city of Cleveland will pay $6 million to Tamir Rice's family. Early last year, Rice's family filed a wrongful death suit in federal court, and the case has now been settled. As part of the settlement, the city "acknowledges no fault in Tamir's death," according to CNN.
The wrongful death lawsuit filed by Rice's family called law enforcement's actions negligent. Unfathomably, the city's response said that Tamir was at fault. And to add insult to deadly injury, former County District Attorney Tim McGinty accused Rice's family of being too focused on money. "They’re very interesting people… let me just leave it at that… and they have their own economic motives,” McGinty said in November 2015.
This is how Tamir Rice died. Officer Timothy Loehmann fired two shots within two seconds of arriving to the scene. Literally two seconds. His car hadn't even stopped moving. Rice was hit once in the chest. No one administered CPR or first aid. Later it was discovered that Loehmann had been deemed "unfit for duty" in his previous law enforcement job.
From the LA Times:
According to Loehmann’s personnel records, released by the city of Independence, [Ohio,] police officials were in the process of firing him when he resigned in December 2012. Supervisors described an emotionally unstable recruit with a “lack of maturity” and “inability to perform basic functions as instructed” during a weapons training exercise.
Tamir Rice was 12 when he was shot. He was unarmed. He was playing in the park.
"They never even gave him a chance," Samaria Rice, Tamir's mother, said last year.