The Police Officer Who Killed 12-Year-Old Tamir Rice Has Been Fired – Mother Jones

The police officer who fatally shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice in a Cleveland park in November 2014 was dismissedThe Cleveland police chief said this at a press conference on Tuesday. The decision came two and a half years after Rice's murder. According to termination documents, Officer Timothy Lehmann was fired not for shooting Rice, but because he lied on his job application about his disciplinary history with a previous police department. (Another officer at the scene of the shooting was suspended for 10 days.)

Lehmann, who began working for the Cleveland Police Department in early 2014, did not disclose that although he voluntarily left his job with another department, he was allowed to resign after a series of incidents in which supervisors deemed him unfit for duty, according to Lehmann. Cleveland.com. He also did not disclose that he had failed the written examination for employment in the second police department.

Lehmann shot and killed Rice after he and his partner responded to a 911 call about a man in the park brandishing a gun. His death became a touchstone for the Black Lives Matter movement. Video of the shooting showed Lehmann fatally shooting the child, who was holding a toy gun, two seconds after arriving on the scene. A grand jury declined to indict the officers involved.

The dispatcher who took the initial 911 call was suspended in March for failing to tell responding officers that the caller had said the person with the gun might be a juvenile and that the gun might be counterfeit. June 2015 Mother Jones investigation showed how this failure contributed to the child's death.