Almost four years after the senseless murder of her 12-year-old son, Samaria Rice is still fighting to keep his killer off of any police force. Her efforts were successful, until now. Last week’s announcement that tiny Bellaire, Ohio, had hired her son’s killer, Timothy Loehmann, rocked the family—and now Rice is gearing up to protest Bellaire Police Chief Dick Flanagan’s terrible choice.
Though Flanagan leans heavily on the killer cop being cleared of all wrongdoing in the shooting of Tamir, there are myriad reasons that Loehmann has no business on the streets of any town. He may not have been charged in the November 2014 shooting, but he was eventually fired by the Cleveland Police Department after it was discovered that he’d lied—both directly and by omission—on his CPD job application.
How did he lie? Let us count the ways.
Loehmann had previously left the police department in nearby Independence, Ohio, after multiple incidents—including a tearful breakdown on a shooting range—that led officials to deem him “emotionally immature” and push him off the force after just six months. In addition to failing a 2009 written exam in Maple Heights, Loehmann was also found to be “mentally unfit” for police work by the Cuyahoga County sheriff’s office. Nonetheless, Loehmann found a job, a badge, and a gun in Cleveland—and used that gun to kill a middle-schooler with a toy gun less than two seconds after arriving at a local rec center.
When Loehmann applied to CPD, they never checked his references or did any deep digging into his background. Why would they? It’s not like he was applying for a job where people’s lives hang in the balance, right?
Despite him being rejected by three different police departments before getting hired by the one that allowed him to murder a middle-schooler without consequences, Bellaire’s Chief Flanagan thinks Loehmann deserves a second chance after killing Tamir.
Samaria Rice disagrees.
Rice ... fears Loehmann’s proven incompetence as an officer puts the safety of Bellaire residents at risk.
“He is emotionally unstable and mentally unstable,” Rice said of Loehmann. “Anytime your mother has to come and get you off a gun range, you are a problem. I think that town and that police department are going to be in danger.”
“I plan to go down to Bellaire to have a conversation with that police department and say, ‘You guys are making a big mistake,’” Rice told Mic by phone Monday morning.
Rice, who was forced into activism by the senseless murder of her son, and who has recently devoted most of her energy to building the Tamir Rice Afrocentric Cultural Center, has already launched a coordinated social media effort to force Flanagan and the village of Bellaire to reconsider, ahead of her planned visit to the town of 4,100 just west of the West Virginia border.
Feel free to join the fight, wherever you are. Do it for Tamir.
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