The family of Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old boy shot and killed by police while playing with a toy gun in November, is irate over new court documents filed on behalf of the city of Cleveland and police officials that say the boy was responsible for his own death.
Walter Madison, an attorney for the Rice family, told The Washington Post the idea that the boy was at fault for the shooting was “incredulous at best” and “unbelievable.”
“There are a number of things that we in society don’t allow 12-year-olds to do. We don’t allow them to vote, we don’t allow them to drink. In court we don’t try them as adults,” Madison told The Post. “They don’t have the capacity to understand the consequences of their actions.”
Cleveland's filing, submitted to the U.S. District Court in the Northeastern District of Ohio on Friday, is a response to the wrongful death suit filed by the Rice family in December and
amended in January, according to the Los Angeles Times.
It says that Tamir Rice's death and all losses were “directly and proximately caused by the failure of [Rice] to exercise due care to avoid injury.”
As word of the court filing spread, online activists became enraged and focused in on comments from Steve Loomis, a spokesperson for the police department, that were
quoted in the DailyKos this week.
“Tamir Rice is in the wrong,” Loomis told Politico last month. “He’s menacing. He’s 5-feet-7, 191 pounds. He wasn’t that little kid you’re seeing in pictures. He’s a 12-year-old in an adult body. He puts his gun in his waistband. Those people — 99 percent of the time those people run away from us. We don’t want him running into the rec center. That could be a whole other set of really bad events. They’re trying to flush him into the field. Frank [the driver] is expecting the kid to run. The circumstances are so fluid and unique."
“The guy with the gun is not running. He’s walking toward us. He’s squaring off with Cleveland police and he has a gun. Loehmann is thinking, ‘Oh my God, he’s pulling it out of his waistband.’”
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