News / Human Rights

Police hand over Tamir Rice investigation to prosecutors

Wednesday, 03 June 2015 8:37 PM [ Last Update: Wednesday, 03 June 2015 8:48 PM ]

Tamir Rice was shot on November 22, 2014 but a grand jury decision is still pending more than six months later. (AP photo)

Police say the investigation into the shooting death of African American boy Tamir Rice by white police officers in the US city of Cleveland has been handed over to prosecutors on Wednesday.

A source with knowledge of the investigation, who asked not to be named, confirmed the news to ABC News on Wednesday.

The source said prosecutors will now present the case to a grand jury, which will decide whether either of the two officers involved in the November shooting death of the 12-year-old should face criminal charges.

The five-month investigation began in January, after officers mistook his toy gun for a real one outside a Cleveland recreation center on November 22, 2014.

Demonstrators block Public Square on November 25, 2014 in Cleveland during a protest over the police shooting of Tamir Rice. (AP photo)

Cuyahoga County Sheriff Clifford Pinkney has been under fire over the slow pace of the investigation.

“My department has conducted a fair, thorough and impartial investigation,” Pinkney told reporters last month. “We’ve pored over thousands of documents and conducted numerous interviews.”

The officers involved said the boy refused to raise his hands and tried to pull the fake gun from his waistband outside the Cudell Recreation Center in Cleveland.

However, a video released by the state police on November 26 clearly shows that one of the officers shot the boy seconds after he got out of the patrol car.

The video, containing stuttered images with no sound, shows the boy walking and pointing his fake gun in different directions. He then enters a gazebo before officers arrive in their patrol car. The first officer, Timothy Loehmann, gets out of the car and shoots the boy instantaneously.

Rice’s death occurred late last year amid unrest across the United States fuelled by police shootings of several unarmed black men, including the deaths of Michael Brown, 18, in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York.

The recent unrest in Baltimore over the death of Freddie Gray was the most violent in the United States since the protests in Ferguson following the fatal shooting of Brown by a white police officer.

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