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The two Cleveland police officers involved in the November 2014 shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice had told investigators they believed he was a grown man with a gun, when in fact he was an adolescent with a replica gun.
Summaries of what officers Timothy Loehman and Frank Garmback said happened in the moments before Loehman fired two shots that killed Tamir at a playground have been heard before, but this is the first time the public has seen their complete statements to the Cuyahoga County sheriff’s office. The Cuyahoga County prosecutor’s office shared the brief statements on Tuesday as part of an ongoing release of files from the controversial shooting.
Each statement is a little more than a page long. In numerous points, Loehman, a rookie officer on probation, connects his actions with the training he’d received.
“The suspect had a gun, had been threatening others with the weapon and had not obeyed our commands to show us his hands,” Loehman wrote. “This was an active shooter situation.”
Many critics previously dismissed the officers’ accounts and concluded that Tamir didn’t appear threatening in a widely seen video of the shooting.
Loehman claimed in his statement that he and Garmback repeatedly yelled at Tamir to “show me your hands.” But the video showed the officer open fire within two seconds of emerging from the police cruiser driven by Garmback.
Neither officer mentioned discovering that what appeared to them like a true firearm was an airsoft-type gun. Normally, pellet guns like this have brightly colored tips to distinguish them from real weapons, but Tamir’s lacked the marking.
