The U.S. Department of Justice announced Tuesday it will not charge any of the officers involved in the fatal shooting of Tamir Rice, a Black 12-year-old boy who was killed by police in Cleveland in 2014. The department has closed its investigation (article available here).
The Justice Department said video of the shooting was of too poor a quality for prosecutors to conclusively establish what had happened, and as such, found insufficient evidence to "support federal criminal charges against Cleveland Division of Police (CDP) Officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback."
Video footage of the killing, which happened in daylight on Nov. 22, 2014, shows the child was shot within two seconds of the police arriving at the scene. Loehmann, who fired two bullets into Rice, and Garmback allege they believed he was carrying a gun. In fact, the boy was playing with a toy air pellet gun near a playground at a city recreation center. Rice died early the next morning at a Cleveland hospital.
A state grand jury had declined to indict Loehmann, though he was later fired nearly three years after Rice's death after it was discovered he was previously deemed “unfit for duty” and had lied on his application to the Cleveland police.