No Charges for Cop Who Killed 12-Year-Old Ohio Boy Tamir Rice

Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty announced shortly after 2:00 PM on Monday that a grand jury has decided not to indict the Cleveland police officer who shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice as he played with a toy gun in a park.

McGinty called the death of the young child a “perfect storm of human error,” despite the fact that Officer Timothy Loehmann waited only 2 seconds after his arrival on the scene before shooting Rice in the abdomen.

A bystander had called 911 to report that a boy was waving a gun which was “probably fake,” though emergency dispatchers did not tell the officers that.

The “gun” was, in fact, a toy.

“It would be irresponsible and unreasonable if law required a police officer to wait and see if the gun was real,” McGinty stated.

"The after-acquired information — that the individual was 12 years old, and the weapon in question was an 'airsoft gun' — is not relevant to a constitutional review of Officer Loehmann's actions," Kimberly Crawford, a 20-year veteran of the FBI and a former instructor at the agency's academy, wrote in one of the reports posted on Saturday.

"His response was a reasonable one," she wrote.

The officers claimed they warned the child three times to put the “gun” down, but many argue that is highly improbable as only two seconds had lapsed between the time of their arrival and when Rice fell to the ground.