US: Cleveland officer who killed black preteen fired

NEW YORK

The Cleveland, Ohio police officer who killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014 was fired on Tuesday, officials said.

Timothy Loehmann, 26, will be terminated immediately, while officer Frank Garmback, 46, that drove the patrol car will be suspended for 10 days, Cleveland police chief Calvin Williams said at a news conference.

"This has been tough on our entire community, and definitely on the Rice family,” Williams said. “When this happened in 2014, I made the comment that this is of course a tragedy, but it’s even more tragic that it happened at the hands of a Cleveland police officer," he added.

Loehmann, who is white, shot the black preteen near a recreation center after police received an emergency called about someone brandishing a gun. The caller said it was probably a toy gun, but the information was not relayed to the officers.

Loehmann wrote in a report in 2014 that he was compelled to shoot after seeing Tamir reach into his waistband.

Video surveillance showed he fired his weapon two seconds after leaving the patrol car.

A grand jury declined to charge Loehmann in 2015, but he faced administrative charges from the department this January, and an emergency dispatcher was suspended for eight days in March.

Cleveland last year agreed to pay $6 million to the family in a settlement.

Shooting deaths of blacks by police have long fueled tensions and led many to believe implicit racial bias on the force has caused overreactions with deadly consequences.

Earlier this month, Texas police officer Roy Oliver was fired from the force, arrested and charged after killing a black teenager by firing into a car full of teenagers in Balch Springs.

Days earlier, South Carolina police officer Michael Slager admitted to violating the civil rights of an unarmed black man he fatally shot in the back during a traffic stop.

Slager faces life in prison if convicted of using excessive force in the 2015 shooting death of Walter Scott in a case that caused nationwide uproar.

Scott’s death was one of a number of killings in 2015 and 2016 that provoked a national debate about law enforcement’s use of lethal force.

The Justice Department this month declined to charge two white officers in the shooting death of Alton Sterling, who was killed last July in Louisiana.

Sterling’s death on July 5 in Baton Rouge, and the killing of Philando Castile, by police in Minnesota the following day, led to massive protests across the country lead by the Black Lives Matter activist group.