Two days before the Ferguson grand jury released its decision, a young black male named Tamir Rice was gunned down in a gazebo in Cleveland, Ohio. This time it was by a rookie police officer named Timothy Loehmann, who mistook Rice’s toy gun for a real one and shot him twice in the torso. Officers said they asked the young boy to raise his hands, but instead he reached for the toy gun in his waistband, which prompted Loehmann to fire. Once again, yet another officer—this time Loehmann—claimed he feared for his life, even though he shot Tamir within two seconds of arriving on the scene. Tamir’s fourteen-year-old sister couldn’t even help; when she ran to his aid, an officer tackled her, put her in handcuffs, and stuffed her into the back of a police car.
Their mother, Samaria, had just gotten home from the grocery store when two boys knocked on her door and told her that Tamir had been shot. She ran across the street to see what had happened, like any well-intentioned parent would do. But when she got there, she was stopped by police and threatened with arrest. “They told me to calm down or I was gonna be in the back of that police car,” Ms. Rice tells me. She went with her son to MetroHealth Medical Center, where doctors worked to save his life. But after she was shadowed by police officers and given little information, Ms. Rice called the local news and told them what went down between Tamir and Cleveland police. “It was a whirlwind of a disaster,” Ms. Rice recalls. “They had no answers about why he was shot.” Tamir would never make it out of the hospital. He died from his injuries the next morning. He was just twelve years old.
This tragedy shouldn’t have happened at all. Before he was a member of the Cleveland Police Department, Officer Loehmann quit the Independence Police Department after he was deemed emotionally unfit to serve. The department’s deputy chief, Jim Polak, questioned Loehmann’s ability to make the right decisions in stressful situations and said he shouldn’t be trusted to handle firearms. According to the report, the officer showed up “weepy” and “distracted” for firearms training and couldn’t “communicate clear thoughts.” Loehmann’s handgun performance was called “dismal,” and that during training he had an emotional breakdown due to issues with a girlfriend. “Maybe I should quit,” the officer reportedly said. “I have no friends.” Polak said Loehmann displayed a “dangerous loss of composure” during live range training and that neither time nor training would correct his behavior.
Loehmann joined the Cleveland Police Department in early 2014 under false pretenses. He claimed he left Independence because he wanted more action. In turn, the Cleveland force failed to investigate his background and let Loehmann roam the streets with a gun. So Tamir’s blood wasn’t just on Loehmann’s hands, it was on the hands of the entire department, which didn’t do enough to make sure the officer was ready for the job. Their shortcomings took Tamir’s life. Loehmann wasn’t charged with a crime.
At the age of twelve, with the whole world in front of him, there’s no telling what Tamir could’ve been—an athlete, an artist, who knows. Ms. Rice remembers Tamir as a fun, affectionate kid who was very attached to her and his older sister. He liked to draw and loved to play soccer, basketball, and football. “He was a busy little boy, a hyper child,” his mother remembers today. And he loved PBS—Sesame Street and The Big Comfy Couch were his favorite shows. Tamir had big dreams, even as a young kid. “He always wanted to do more,” his mother says. “He wanted to play even more basketball and soccer.” She remembers the little things about Tamir, the fact that he picked up potty training very young, was a talented swimmer, and never needed training wheels on his bicycle: “No one showed him how to do anything, he did it on his own.” Even at five years old, Tamir was outspoken and liked to make his family laugh. He was gonna be tall, so much so that in the first grade, teachers used to call on Tamir in class because he stood head and shoulders above his classmates. He was also a character who loved to lighten the mood.
Michael Brown Sr. can’t help but think what could’ve been if the convenience store employee hadn’t called the police to claim his son was stealing (“He was picking up what he was owed,” he says), if the police hadn’t been looking for him, if Wilson hadn’t stopped to talk to him. “Big Mike” would likely still be alive, still writing rhymes and uploading music to SoundCloud, still making his family laugh, still listening to Kendrick Lamar on his computer. “He just graduated and wanted to be a rapper,” Brown Sr. recalls. “He had his own dreams, things he wanted to figure out on his own.” Rapping under the name Big Mike, the teenager used to spit bars about becoming a star and making it out of his neighborhood. He was clearly a novice, but was planning to attend vocational school while learning more about sound engineering.
Racial tensions escalated even further after that, but the nation still had its eyes trained on Ferguson and the grand jury decision. Then it happened: on November 24, 2014, the grand jury decided not to bring criminal charges against Officer Darren Wilson in the death of Mike Brown. Rage consumed the protesters. New York fumed and Ferguson exploded. “Burn this bitch down,” Mike Brown’s stepfather, Louis Head, yelled to the crowd following the grand jury
