*The Cleveland police officer who shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice has been fired by the department for “providing false information” on his application to become a cop, officials announced Tuesday.
Timothy Loehmann’s termination is “effective immediately,” Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams said during a press conference Tuesday announcing the results of the city’s investigation into the rookie cop.
Loehmann fatally shot Rice outside a park pavilion while responding to a call in November 2014 with partner, Cleveland police officer Frank Garmback. In 2015, a grand jury declined to criminally charge Loehmann in the shooting. He had joined the force just eight months prior to the incident.
Buzzfeed and other media outlets reported after the shooting that Loehmann was not totally forthcoming about his employment history in documents provided as part of his application to the department:
Documents obtained by BuzzFeed News after the shooting revealed that when Loehmann left his old job as a cop in Independence, Ohio, he was in the process of being fired for dismal performance, but was given a chance to resign before this happened. Loehmann failed to disclose his troubles in Independence in his Cleveland police application.
At the time, the Cleveland Police told BuzzFeed News they never asked the City of Independence for his personnel file.
On Tuesday, Williams said that he believes these falsehoods in Loehmann’s application would have “come out eventually” but admitted that the department wouldn’t have learned about his past employment history as “quickly if this didn’t happen.”
Director of Public Safety for Cleveland Michael McGrath also announced Tuesday that Garmback will be suspended for 10 days and given additional training for his role in the deadly incident.
The decision to fire Loehmann and reprimand Garmback comes more than two years after Rice was killed.
“There’s a 12 year old kid dead — people on both sides are going to say we didn’t do enough or we did too much,” Williams said Tuesday. “We have to go through our process. We have to be fair and objective to our process.”
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