Cleveland officials apologized to the family of Tamir Rice on Thursday, and said that a claim against his estate for the cost of the 12-year-old’s ambulance ride to the hospital would be withdrawn.
The attached invoice notes requests $450 for “ambulance advance life support” and $50 for mileage.
At a news conference Thursday, the claim was described as routine paperwork, though Mayor Frank Jackson said that it should have been flagged, according to reports.
City lawyers who filed the claim were following procedure, but they didn’t account for the sensitive nature of the Tamir case or notify the mayor before it was submitted, Jackson said.“It was mistake in terms of us not flagging it, but it was not a mistake in terms of the legal process,” Jackson said.
Tamir was fatally shot by Cleveland police officer Timothy Loehmann at an outdoor recreation center Nov. 22, 2014. Loehmann and his partner, Officer Frank Garmback, were responding to a call about a man with a gun. They pulled up in front of Tamir seconds before Loehmann stepped out of the police car and opened fire.
The officers said Tamir appeared to be reaching into his waistband for a gun in the moments leading up to his being shot. In fact, the weapon was a toy.
“The Rice family is disturbed by the city’s behavior,” Subodh Chandra, an attorney for the family, wrote in an email to The Washington Post about the creditor’s claim. “The callousness, insensitivity, and poor judgment required for the city to send a bill — its own police officers having slain 12-year-old Tamir — is breathtaking.”
He said the act “added insult to homicide.”
Jonathan Abady, the family’s lead counsel on a wrongful death lawsuit against the city, said in a phone interview with The Washington Post that the claim is “mystifying.”
“This is obviously a deliberate, considered action by the city of Cleveland; it required a formal court filing,” he said.
A grand jury’s decision not to indict the officers in December prompted protesters to call for a federal investigation into the shooting and for the resignation of Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty.
In his announcement, McGinty said enhanced surveillance video made it “undisputably clear” that Tamir was reaching for something “indistinguishable” from a real gun.
The case fueled ongoing controversy about police shootings and racial profiling: Tamir died days before unrest erupted in response to the non-indictment of officers involved in the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner in New York, two unarmed African American men.
Tamir’s family alleges in the suit that Loehmann and Garmback did not attempt to resuscitate or administer first aid to the boy after he was wounded. Instead, the suit claims, they tackled and handcuffed Tamir’s distraught 14-year-old sister and placed her in the back of the police cruiser.
Tamir died of his wounds in the hospital the next day.
The police officers maintained in signed statements that Tamir appeared to be much older than his age. McGinty was criticized for releasing these statements and other pieces of evidence to the news media, which family members viewed as a show of support for the officers.
“Prosecutor McGinty deliberately sabotaged the case, never advocating for my son, and acting like the police officers’ defense attorney,” Tamir’s mother, Samaria Rice, said in a statement following the grand jury decision.
The city’s creditor’s claim asks the family to pay the $500 ambulance fee by March 11.
This report has been updated.
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