Tamir Rice
Samaria Rice, the mother of Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old boy shot and killed by Cleveland police while carrying a toy gun, is
looking for justice:
The mother of four has already filed a wrongful death lawsuit over Tamir's death but she said this morning that she wants "the police [to] be accountable for what they did to my son."
"I'm looking for a conviction for both of the officers," she said.
Rice told ABC News that the police also mistreated her 14-year-old daughter when she arrived after Tamir was shot:
"I couldn't believe they tackled her and put her in handcuffs and in the back of the same police car that was on the grass that the officer got out of and shot her brother so my daughter is sitting there looking at her brother on the ground," Rice said this morning.
It's pretty unbelievable, but no more so than that they shot a child just seconds after pulling up to where a 911 caller had specified that they might well be looking at a child with a toy gun. No more so than any of several other cases of police brutality in Cleveland in recent years that led the Justice Department to
investigate and begin putting into place a consent decree to put the brakes on the Cleveland police department's use of excessive force. But who knows. Maybe the almost instantaneous shooting of a child by a police officer with serious professional issues in a police department under Justice Department investigation will lead to justice where the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner didn't.