Bellaire police hire cop who killed Tamir Rice
A former Cleveland patrol officer who fatally shot Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy whose death in 2014 intensified national outrage over the killing of unarmed black men and boys, has been hired by a police department in a small Ohio village.
The Bellaire Police Department, which patrols a community of about 4,000 just opposite the Ohio River from West Virginia, announced Friday that the officer, Timothy Loehmann, had joined the force in a part-time position. The department’s chief said he had no concerns about hiring Loehmann, who was not charged in Tamir’s death but who was fired last year after a Cleveland Police Department investigation into the shooting uncovered that he had lied on his job application.
“He was cleared of any and all wrongdoing,” the Bellaire police chief, Richard Flanagan, told The Times Leader of Martins Ferry, Ohio, adding that it was unfair to “crucify” the officer. “It’s over and done with.”
In an interview with The Daily Beast on Monday, Samaria Rice, Tamir’s mother, said she had a visceral response to the news — “a feeling of numbness through my whole body” — and questioned the decision.
“How could anyone even consider putting him on a police force?” she said. “That police chief is putting his own people in danger.”
The Tamir Rice Foundation also encouraged followers on Facebook to call village officials to demand that the offer be rescinded.
Loehmann, Flanagan and the village’s mayor, Vince DiFabrizio, did not return requests for comment Monday morning. A Village Council member said he learned about Loehmann’s hiring in the local newspaper and he wanted to hear the chief ’s explanation for his decision at the next council meeting.
“He has the right to hire whoever he wants,” the councilman, Jerry Fisher, said in an interview Monday. “On social media, you get pros and cons. I don’t know until I hear what the chief has to say.”
But in Bellaire and beyond, the Police Department was quickly criticized for employing the officer, whose actions in November 2014 set off national protests about the use of force by white law enforcement officers against unarmed African-Americans.
Owens L. Brown, president of the NAACP chapter in Wheeling, West Virginia, across the river from Bellaire, said he was not surprised that a police department in the area would hire Loehmann. (Bellaire does not have its own NAACP chapter, Brown said.) More than 93 percent of the people who live in the metropolitan area that includes Wheeling and Bellaire are white, according to the census.
“It’s a travesty that they are willing to hire this person and goes to show that there is a lack of caring,” Brown said Monday. “It may be par for the course for some of the attitudes here from the police.”
A camera that captured Tamir’s killing showed that Loehmann stepped out of the passenger side of a patrol car and within seconds opened fire on Tamir, who was playing with a pellet gun, at a park. Loehmann, who was responding to a 911 call about “a guy in here with a pistol,” claimed that he feared for his life when he saw the pellet gun.
The officer who was driving the car, Frank Garmback, was suspended for five days.
The 911 operator who took the call was also suspended after an investigation found that she did not relay to the responding officers the caller’s belief that Tamir was “probably a juvenile” and that the weapon was “probably fake.”
On Friday, Flanagan announced that he had also hired another part-time officer: Eric Smith, who was suspended in April as police chief in Bethesda and is under investigation by the Ohio Attorney General’s Office for alleged misuse of a state criminal justice database.