Tamir Rice's family said this week that they were sent a $500 bill for ambulance services for their son, who was fatally shot by a police officer in November 2014, but Cleveland's mayor insists no claim was sent and the whole thing is an insurance mix-up.
According to Cleveland.com, assistant law director Carl Meyers filed the claim in Cuyahoga County Probate Court Wednesday alerting the 12-year-old's estate that it owes the City of Cleveland $500 for "ambulance advance life support" and the MetroHealth Medical Center ambulance mileage expense. The website posted a copy of the four-page document.
"The Rice family is disturbed by the city's behavior," Rice family attorney Subodh Chandra said in a statement Wednesday. "The callousness, insensitivity, and poor judgment required for the city to send a bill after its own police officers killed 12-year-old Tamir is breathtaking. This adds insult to homicide."
But in a Thursday news conference, Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson insisted that no bill was sent to the Rice family and the boy's estate does not owe the city anything.
"No intent or no sending of a bill to the Tamir Rice family. Medicaid paid their portion; we closed the account and
absorbed the rest," Jackson said, according to Fox8.com. "When the state asked for the information, then it generated the other side of the process that reopened it, and sent that bill to the state."
"Some insurance companies will pay the whole bill; others, like Medicaid, are limited in what they will pay," he continued. "The policy of the city is whenever the likelihood of collecting the balance is nill, you recognize that and write it off. Someone should have flagged this — in this case."
In December, a Cuyahoga County grand jury declined to indict two Cleveland police officers involved in the Rice shooting incident on Nov. 22, 2014, according to Fox8.com. The boy was reportedly playing with toy gun that officers believed was real when they drove up on him outside of the Cudell Recreation Center after receiving a call.
The Rice family has sued the city in a civil suit, accusing officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback of showing indifference to the boy's life by not rendering any emergency aid after he was shot by Loehmann, Cleveland.com noted.
The website said the officers stood around Rice for four minutes until an FBI agent came on the scene and started administering first aid.
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