(CNN) —
As Tamir Rice’s 14-year-old sister rushed to her brother’s side upon learning he’d been shot, police officers “tackled” her, handcuffed her and placed her in a squad car with the Cleveland officer who shot Tamir, her mother and a Rice family attorney told reporters Monday. […]
Speaking at a Baptist church in Cleveland, [mother Samaria] Rice recalled how a seemingly normal November 22 morphed into tragedy as two Cleveland police officers pulled up to her son outside a recreation center across the street from her home.
Within two seconds of exiting the police car, Officer Timothy Loehmann gunned down Tamir, 12. The boy died the next day.
Tamir was playing with a pellet gun, and a witness who saw “a guy with a pistol”
told 911 twice that it was “probably” fake but that Tamir was scaring people. It doesn’t appear the 911 dispatcher relayed the information to Officers Loehmann, 26, and Frank Garmback, 46.
Police have said that Loehmann, who has been
criticized for his policing in the past, opened fire after Tamir reached for the gun in his waistband
"Less than two seconds."
Watch the video, if you can stomach it. Tell me one word of the police statements in this paragraph is a) true and b) relevant.
and that an orange tip indicating the gun was a toy had been removed. Rice said she didn’t allow her son to play with toy guns, explaining that one of his friends had given it to him. […]
She ran to the scene, admittedly frantic, and arrived at the same time as an ambulance. Officers wouldn’t let her check on her son, she said, “and then I saw my daughter in the back of a police car, the same one the shooter got out of.” Family attorney Walter Madison said
police placed Tamir’s sister in the car with Loehmann.
Samaria Rice said she calmed down and asked police to release her daughter. They told her no, she said.
Not only would they not release her daughter, but later, she said, they made her choose: Stay with her daughter or accompany her son to a hospital. […]
In a
lawsuit filed last week against the city and the two officers, the family says
Loehmann and Garmback “refused to provide any medical attention to Tamir for at least four minutes as he lay on the ground alive and bleeding.”
Cleveland police Chief Calvin Williams has previously said that
four minutes after Tamir was shot, a detective and FBI agent arrived and the FBI agent administered first aid. Paramedics arrived three minutes later, the chief said.