Mother Of Cleveland Boy Shot By Police: “They Didn’t Give Him a Chance”
The mother of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy who was fatally shot by police, spoke out for the first time since the burial of her son. Samaria Rice recalled how she received news that her youngest of four children had been shot.
“Two little boys came and knocked on my door and said, ‘Police officers just shot your son twice in the stomach,’” she said. “I really thought they was playing, like joking around, but I saw the seriousness in their face, and it scared me.”
Samaria arrived on the scene at the same time as ambulance before being threatened with arrest herself when police kept her from running to her son’s aid. Her 14-year-old daughter was already put in the back of a police car.
“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,” Rice said. “So my daughter is sitting there looking at her brother on the ground.”
After calming down, Rice asked police to release her daughter, to which they responded no. Not only did they refuse to release her daughter, she said they later gave her an ultimatum of whether or not she wanted to stay with her daughter or accompany her son to a hospital.
Tamir was playing with his plastic toy gun outside a recreation center across the street from his home when Officer Timothy Loehmann gunned him down within two seconds of exiting the police car. Tamir died the next day.
“If they had said something he would have cooperated with them,” Rice said of her son. “By them scaring him like that, he didn’t even have a chance. They didn’t even give him a chance to cooperate.”
Rice is looking for a conviction of both officers involved in the fatal shooting of her son. She is being represented by Benjamin Crump, the same attorney who helped the parents of Michael Brown, the teen fatally shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, this summer.
Watch the exclusive news conference, below:
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