New Video of Police Murder of 12-Year-Old Tamir Rice... and Attack on His 14-Year-Old Sister

January 19, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Millions of people have seen the video of the cold-blooded police killing of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio. A child, shot down because he was Black and was playing with a toy gun on November 22, 2014—only two days before a grand jury in St. Louis County, Missouri decided not to indict the cop who killed Michael Brown.

After the Cleveland cops got a 911 call about someone on a playground with a gun that was “probably fake,” a police car rolls up, two cops jump out and within TWO SECONDS, Tamir is shot twice in the stomach. Then as he lay on the ground, police waited four minutes before even making any attempt to administer first aid. Tamir died early the next day. This murder—adding on to all the other and continuing instances of police murder—has sparked ongoing protests.

People have been especially outraged how the police jumped out of the car and within seconds shot this child. And now on January 7, new video footage was made available showing how after Tamir was shot, his 14-year-old sister was attacked by the police when she tried to come to her brother’s aid. You can see in the video how right after he was shot she comes running towards him but is intercepted by a cop, tackled and forced to the ground. Then another cop comes running up and also piles on. She is handcuffed and then taken to the police car.

This whole scene is played out within the first two minutes of a 30-minute video that was taken by a surveillance camera at the Cudell Recreation Center where Tamir Rice was killed. This additional video was obtained and then released only by Northeast Ohio Media Group after protracted talks with city officials, who initially refused to release it.

This video now confirms what Tamir Rice’s mother, Samaira Rice, claimed at a December 8 press conference when she said: “I noticed my son laying down on the ground and I went charging and yelling and everything at the police because they wouldn’t let me through. Then I seen my daughter in the back of the police car—the same car that the shooter got out of. As I was trying to get through to my son, the police told me to calm down or they would put me in the back of a police car. She told me that the police tackled her and put her in handcuffs. I didn’t even know she was in handcuffs. I knew she was crying for me, but I couldn’t see her hands. This is what she told me that she was in handcuffs in the back of the car. They also questioned her with no adult around.”

This newly released video also shows how neither Timothy Loehmann, the cop who shot Tamir Rice, nor his partner, Frank Garmback, immediately attend to the boy. Tamir isn’t given any medical attention at all until after about four minutes go by and, according to the police account, an FBI agent, who happened to be in the area, shows up and administers CPR.

The Rice family attorney Benjamin Crump said in a statement after the release of the video: “This video shows in crystal-clear HD that the responding officers acted inappropriately and recklessly, both in how they handled the shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice and the events that immediately followed. The family is outraged that rather than comfort a sister coming to the aid of her dying brother, the officers instead manhandled and tackled her, cuffed her and thoughtlessly tossed her in the back of a patrol car.”

Yet one more piece of concrete evidence illustrating the total illegitimacy of this system and its armed enforcers.

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