Officer involved in Tamir Rice shooting gets new job: I-Team
***Video above: Tamir Rice’s life honored with butterfly garden.***
CLEVELAND (WJW) – The FOX 8 I-Team has found a former Cleveland police officer notorious for the shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice has gotten a new job out of state.
Now, the lawyer representing Tamir’s mother has released a blistering statement.
Timothy Loehmann is going to the White Sulphur Springs Police Department in West Virginia.
The I-Team texted Loehmann to ask about the job but have not heard back. We also reached out to the White Sulphur Springs mayor and police chief to discuss the matter but they did not return calls or emails.
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Loehmann was fired from the Cleveland Division of Police in 2017 for lying on his police application, not for the deadly shooting. The city said he did not fully disclose his employment history.
Rice was killed outside the Cudell Recreation Center on the city’s west side on Nov. 22, 2014.
Police were called for a report of a man with a gun. Police said Officer Loehmann opened fire when he said the boy reached towards his waistband. The gun turned out to be an airsoft pistol.
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No criminal charges were filed against the rookie police officer or his partner.
Attorney Subodh Chandra, who represents Tamir’s mother, released the following statement Friday evening:
“White Sulphur Springs’s police chief and its public officials evidently don’t care that (1) the City of Independence, Ohio considered Timothy Loehmann mentally unfit for duty, (2) Cleveland fired him because he lied on his application (a firing affirmed on appeals), (3) he rushed upon and slew a child, and (4) in the ensuing investigation he lied about calling out warnings to Tamir when his fellow officer said the windows were up that fateful winter’s day.
“While any normal person (and certainly any child) would grasp that Loehmann should never be entrusted with a badge and gun, some people love lying, child-killing cops so much that they are determined to foist him on the rest of us.
“Every time Loehmann resurfaces in his game of bad-cop whack-a-mole, he torments the family of Tamir Rice. Why can’t he just go away and live the rest of his life—life he deprived Tamir of—in humility? Why does he insist on being a cop? It seems pathological at this point.
“And what sort of crazy public officials don’t care that they must now disclose that he’s a known liar to defendants in every criminal case he’s involved in? Loehmann is a Brady/Giglio cop because of his lies on his police application and during the Tamir Rice investigation, and because Independence found him unfit. Timothy Loehmann should be radioactive to any sensible member of law enforcement community.
“Officials who think its okay to hire him as a cop are betraying their citizens’ trust. As a former federal prosecutor, I’m disgusted by the lack of integrity.
“Let’s hope White Sulphur Springs residents have the good sense to condemn the poor judgment of their morally bankrupt police chief.
“It’s also deeply troubling that White Sulphur Springs police are retaliating against those (including journalists) who ask questions about Loehmann by quashing their First Amendment rights. But it tells us what we need to know about the indifference of public officials there to civil rights.
“White Sulphur Spring officials should be sued over that and the city bankrupted.”
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