Tamir Rice.Photo: Richardson & Kucharski Co., L.P.A./AP
Two Cleveland police officers will not be criminally charged for their involvement in the 2014 killing of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in an Ohio park, the Justice Department announced on Tuesday.
According to aDepartment of Justice release, federal prosecutors concluded that the poor quality of the video from the shooting could not prove that Officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback obstructed justice.
Prosecutors reportedly said that because the officers' claimed that Loehmann believed Tamir was going for his gun when he fatally shot him, the DOJ would have to prove that Loehmann’s actions willfully broke the law rather than being the result of a mistake, negligence or bad judgment.
In December 2015, agrand jury declined to chargeLoehmann on any charges for shooting Tamir. Garmback was also not charged.
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According to CNN, Loehmann was later fired in May 2017 after investigators found he wasn’t truthful about his employment history when he applied for the job, while Garmback was suspended for 10 days because he violated tactical rules relating to how he drove up to the scene with Loehmann before Tamir was shot.
Jonathan Abady, the Rice family’s attorney, told CNN that Tamir’s mother,Samaria Rice, is “beside herself with grief and disappointment” over the DOJ’s decision.
Tamir’s family agreed to a $6 million settlement in 2016 in a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city, PEOPLE confirmed at the time.
As part of the settlement, the city did not have to admit any wrongdoing, Zoe Salzman, one of the family’s lawyers, told PEOPLE at the time. Because of the settlement, the case never went to trial.
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source: people.com
