On November 22, 2014, Cleveland Police Officer Timothy Loehman shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice outside of his home as he played at the neighborhood park on a snowy weekend afternoon.
It took police seeing Tamir just 0.792 seconds to shoot and kill him.
The entire incident — including the four and a half minutes officers completely ignored Tamir as he bled out in the snow — was filmed by a nearby camera.
Since then, though, the investigation has gone on for an outrageous 352 days. That’s 8,442 hours or 506,880 minutes, or 30,412,800 seconds
It’s safe to say that the prosecutor and the investigators have carried this on to the point of ridiculousness.
Initially, the case was passed around like a hot potato. First, the Cleveland Police Department was heading the investigation. They then passed it on the Cuyahoga Sheriff’s Office.
By January of this year, and for most of the past 10 months, the investigation was being overseen by the Cuyahoga Prosecutors Office and their lead attorney, Tim McGinty.
Never did the family of Tamir Rice, or his grief-stricken classmates, believe that they would go a full year without even a decision being made on whether or not the officer will be prosecuted.
To make Tamir’s family and friends wait an entire year is a brand new injustice in and of itself. If the ultimate decision is to not prosecute the officers involved, even after a year long investigation (which has left so many people in an emotional limbo), it will be just another kick in the gut.
It’s believed that a grand jury has been reviewing the case since late October, but many believe that the officers involved — who refused to speak to prosecutors during their investigation — won’t even be testifying before the grand jury.
Just days after two Louisiana police officers shot and killed a 6-year-old boy, the youngest victim since Tamir, they were arrested and charged with murder.
In that case, the officers who were arrested were black and the young boy was white. It’s hard to not to think that the roles of race and power have caused these severe delays in Tamir’s case.
