Timothy Loehmann (photo, left) is back in court trying to get his job back. (Read story here.)
Loehmann was the trigger-happy rookie cop who shot Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old black boy, in a Cleveland public park in 2014. Rice was playing with a toy gun. Loehmann and a veteran officer were sent to the park to investigate. Upon arriving, Loehmann leaped out of the squad car and opened fire.
It took the Cleveland P.D. three years to fire Loehmann, and he wasn’t fired for his shoot-first, ask-questions-later killing of a kid in a playground. He was fired for not disclosing on his job application that he’d been fired by another police department that decided he was temperamentally unsuited for police work.
A labor arbitrator upheld that dismissal, and a lower court rejected the police union’s appeal of the arbitrator’s ruling because it failed to comply with a notice requirement.
That’s being appealed to Ohio’s supreme court, which has prompted Rice’s mother to file a “friend of court” brief arguing against Loehmann’s reinstatement.
However, it’s unlikely the court will address that issue. A ruling in Loehmann’s favor on the procedural issue would only reopen his appeal of the arbitrator’s ruling and get him a hearing on that in the lower court.
The city paid Rice’s family $6 million, but no federal or state charges were filed against Loehmann; and despite nationwide protests against Rice’s killing, he was hired again by another police department (read that story here), although only part-time.