Sat 7/16 @ 11AM
Tamir Rice was 12 on November 22, 2014 when he was shot by police while playing near a gazebo outside the Cudell Recreation Center in Cleveland’s west side. The shooter, Timothy Loehmann, had been found emotionally unsuited for police work by the Independence Police Department and let go after only after 6 months; he was hired by Cleveland without a background check. For the second time last week, it was revealed that Loehmann had been hired by a small-town police department, a hiring rescinded when the Rice family & activists drew attention to it. You’d think by now he’d find another line of work.
Sadly, Tamir who would be 20 now, won’t have that option. And the city of Cleveland declined to preserve the gazebo where he died as a memorial. It’s now in Chicago, in a landscaped lot next to artist Theaster Gates’ Stony Island Arts Bank in the city’s Woodlawn neighborhood, just blocks from where the Obama Presidential Center is going up.
Instead, the Cudell Center will be the location of the Rice Butterfly Memorial, a garden honoring both Tamir and his sister Tajai, then 14, who was assaulted by police, thrown in a cruiser & threatened with arrest when she tried to run to her dying brother’s side.
The Tamir Rice Foundation, which is currently rehabbing a building on St. Clair to house the Tamir Rice Afrocentric Cultural Center will host a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the garden, in an event co-sponsored by the Case Western Reserve University Social Justice Institute. It’s free and open to the public.
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