I can only imagine the deep terror of both mother and child isolated from each other.
She was then denied entrance to the back of the ambulance to ride with or hold the hand of her son on the way to the hospital. When Tamir’s mother arrived at the same time as the ambulance the police wouldn’t let her get close to her son and she said they threatened to handcuff and arrest her too if she didn’t calm down. When Tamir’s 14-year-old sister ran to see and comfort him she was tackled by a police officer, handcuffed, and put in the back of a squad car unable to comfort her stricken brother. An FBI agent who happened to be nearby responded to the police activity and was the first one to try to give Tamir help. Worse, this child was left mortally wounded on the ground in agony for nearly four minutes while neither Loehmann nor his trainer Frank Garmback administered any first aid. The surveillance video shows Loehmann took less than two seconds between getting out of the barely-stopped car and shooting Tamir. Tamir was sitting outside a recreation center near his home holding a friend’s toy gun when Loehmann careened up in his squad car with his training officer. Not Cleveland police officer Timothy Loehmann-the man who shot him. When Tamir, a mere boy child, was shot and killed last November, who was there to protect him? Sometimes his teacher had to remind him not to tap a song on his desk with his fingers. I was particularly affected by Tamir Rice’s senseless death-a 12-year-old sixth grader who loved drawing, basketball, playing the drums, and performing in his school’s drumline. Like so many I have been deeply disturbed by the senseless loss of Black male lives at the hands of law enforcement officials. God did not make two classes of people or children and America continues to do so at its peril. We must protect the lives of our young people-all of them.
Justice cannot breathe when Black men and boys and women and girls are routinely profiled, abused, arrested, and killed with impunity by police officers. Democracy cannot breathe, and will die, if those enjoined to protect and uphold the law snuff it out unjustly and without consequence.
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