Another bit to add to the pile of awful.
As Tamir Rice’s 14-year-old sister rushed to her brother’s side upon learning he’d been shot, police officers “tackled” her, handcuffed her and placed her in a squad car with the Cleveland officer who shot Tamir, her mother and a Rice family attorney told reporters Monday.
The mother, Samaria Rice, was threatened with arrest herself as she “went charging and yelling at police” because they wouldn’t let her run to her son’s aid, she said.
Two little boys had come to her door and told her the police had just shot her son. At first she thought they were messing around, but then she realized they weren’t.
She ran to the scene, admittedly frantic, and arrived at the same time as an ambulance. Officers wouldn’t let her check on her son, she said, “and then I saw my daughter in the back of a police car, the same one the shooter got out of.” Family attorney Walter Madison said police placed Tamir’s sister in the car with Loehmann.
Samaria Rice said she calmed down and asked police to release her daughter. They told her no, she said. Not only would they not release her daughter, but later, she said, they made her choose: Stay with her daughter or accompany her son to a hospital.
She chose the latter but was told she couldn’t ride in the back of the ambulance with her son, so she rode in the front seat on the way to the hospital, she said.
That’s fabulous police work. They knew by then that the gun was a toy – so on what possible grounds were they detaining his sister? On what possible grounds were they refusing to release his sister, and refusing to let his mother sit with him in the fucking ambulance?? They knew they had just shot a playing child in the stomach, and they wouldn’t let his mother sit with him in the ambulance. What.the.hell.