By Ellie-Louise Style
Young boy dies in shooting by the local police in Cleveland, USA.
A 12 year old boy named Tamir Rice died on Sunday 23rd of November in Cleveland. Cleveland police assumed Tamir was carrying a real gun.
Tamir was in fact carrying a replica gun of a semi-automatic pistol at the time of the incident. When the police officers approached him he didn’t make any verbal threats, instead the young boy pulled out the fake gun.
The police assumed it was a real gun and shot the boy twice, he later died from these injuries.
The police officer said that he automatically thought it was a real gun was because ‘the orange safety indicator had been removed’.
A man who was near the park, made the 911 call. He claimed that he saw the boy pulling out his fake gun and scaring other members of the public with it.
Timothy Kucharski (the family’s lawyer) said he wasn’t too sure on the exact events that took place that day, but the boy went to the park on Saturday with a group of his friends.
He also said ‘ I don’t want to make a harsh judgement.’ And is going to find out more facts about what happened, while interviewing key witnesses to the incident.
The Cleveland Police Department are now going do to an investigation into the shooting of the boy, and as a normal procedure both police officers have been put on administrative leave.
