Family and friends of Tamir Rice will gather at 5 p.m. today at Cudell Rec Center for a vigil and rally on behalf of the 12-year-old boy. 48 hours after a Cleveland police officer shot Tamir, those close to him are expected to make their first public statements to the anticipated crowd.
But an account written by Case grad student and Cleveland City Council intern Shelly Gracon has been circulating over the past 24 hours or so. Here, she describes speaking with two girls who knew Tamir. One witnessed the shooting.
i want to do honor to 12 year old tamir rice (and write this out while it is fresh), so i am going to share with you what i just experienced. i was able to speak with two young girls. one witnessed the shooting, the other was out of town (she told me she felt bad cause he had asked her to go to the rec center with him earlier that day). both knew him very well and had only good things to say – well, i guess he could be a pain sometimes, i was told – we laughed. he was a gifted artist. he was very sensitive and creative. he had the BB gun because often times he was made fun of and bullied because he had learning disabilities. he never had it out. he never was a threat. his friend did say that BB guns look too real, and she thinks no one should have guns.
he and his friends went over to the RTA station across the street and a white man who was there called the police cause he must have seen the gun. they came running back to cudell rec. and were just sitting together when the police arrived. the police pulled their guns on the boy, his friends backed away, and he said it was just a BB gun w/ no bullets and went to lift his shirt to show it to them and they shot him twice in the stomach. in front of not only his friends, but also other children, and i believe his sister as well. his sister was screaming and the police slammed her down on the ground – they actually hurt her they were so aggressive. his brother also came onto the scene and was upset and the police slammed him on the ground as well.
meanwhile, this child is shot. his mother finds out and is heard screaming through the neighborhood. all this is happening in the middle of the day. yesterday. at a rec center. he was very involved there, and knew everyone. he was described as shy and very talented at art. his friend told me about a drawing he made for her. she said she told him that god is always in his heart, and that he is special. these two girls really were such beautiful souls.
he told his friend that was there when he was shot earlier in the week that he thought something bad was going to happen to him. this boy was a gifted empath. he was NOT A THREAT TO ANYONE.
so, take that to the news.
“It’s gone viral now, which I wasn’t really prepared for,” Shelly tells Scene. “Because I truly believe what I heard from them, I want to get the truth out — which is what people are relating to and sharing — but in the same regard, they’re still children.
“I’m trying really hard to protect them,” she says, “because they’re so young.” She spoke with the girls at Cudell Rec Center yesterday, teddy bear and candle in hand, amid an impromptu vigil.
In talking with the girls — “very very close if not best friends with this boy,” Shelly says — she began to gather an impression of Tamir that hasn’t surfaced widely in local media reports.
“I more so want people to understand who this boy was as a person,” Shelly says. “He wasn’t a thug. He wasn’t what people are making him out to be at all. He was someone who had a lot of friends who hung out at that rec center all the time.
“He was bullied at school, body-slammed a lot at school — really, really picked on,” Shelly adds. The girls told her that he had the airsoft gun to make himself feel safer. They relayed to her that he “never had any intent to harm anyone with it.”
Video of the shooting is not yet being released publicly. The family has not viewed the video, though their representatives have seen it. It’s expected that the footage might clear up mixed messages over Tamir’s final moments and what sort of interaction was taking place between him and the officer.
The shooting came just 11 days after a public safety forum at the recreation center. Members of the Edgewater and Baltic neighborhoods gathered Nov. 11 to discuss safety issues in the community and how residents could better engage the neighborhood. Shelly helped organize the forum in her role as a city intern with Ward 15.
“There’s another side to this story that is not being heard,” she says. “I feel like this community is not being heard.”
Hence the viral post, and hence her ongoing work in the ward. “I want out of this to come conversation within the community — about what happened and how we can move forward and heal and stop this from happening again.” She cited counseling for the children who were at the playground Nov. 22 as one specific and much-needed route forward.
This article appears in Nov 19-25, 2014.
as long as there are people with learning and social disabilities, there will be people getting shot needlessly by cops.
An “eyewitness account” – we know how accurate the eyewitnesses were in the Ferguson case. This is heresay.
THe same thing happened to me. Same story. Flint Michigan. I was 16. Raised my shirt. Said its just a BB Gun and they ordered me to the ground and jammed their gun into my neck. I kept repeating its only a bb gun. This goes to show, that “CERTAIN” police live with constant fear and should not be doing this job. There are good cops out there, they are just afraid of the bad ones and I totally understand why.
I agree Mason E. Boor. “as long as there are people with learning and social disabilities, there will be people getting shot needlessly by cops..” Because the police department will keep hiring them.
This is so sad.
What a good cry piece for all you teary eyed liberals. If you are all so good at looking over the cops’ shoulders, put your whiny butts to work. Join the cops and see if you can do the job. Bet you quit. The kid made a mistake, but he was playing a deadly game. So now what’s next? You are all going to go and burn the town down or put on silly masks and join “Anonymous?”.
“They relayed to her that he “never had any intent to harm anyone with it.” Which begs the obvious question: That may be so, but how the hell was the cop supposed to know this? And the victim assumedly made a conscious decision to remove the orange marking from the pistol, no matter how legitimate his motive.
Why was the skin color of the 911 caller relevant to the person who wrote this?
Thank goodness there is footage of this. Hopefully unlike Ferguson we will have a clear answer to what happened.
Tamir “never had [the BB gun] out.” However, “A white man who was there called the police cause he must have seen the gun.”
There is a significant unanswered question in this account of how the gun that was never out was seen.
I don’t advocating jumping to conclusions on incomplete information, but this account as it stands does not succeed in discrediting the caller.
I was 16 years old and walking down the street in the neighborhood over from mine. I rang someones door bell and asked them if I could use their phone to call my dad to let him know where I was. They told me “no” so I said okay and kept walking. I got hassled by the cops 5 minutes later. They pressed me up against the hood of the cruiser and searched me all without telling me why. I was able to get a hold of my dad and he came to pick me up. The cops told him that they got an eyewitness report saying I was “high and trying to break into multiple peoples houses” Since then I have always been skeptical of cops and eyewitness reports.
@Gavin Coe: That was an unfortunate and traumatic incident for you, but what if, in fact, the eyewitness was correct and you were, in fact, casing houses to burglarize? The resident would have been a good citizen and the police would have been credited with doing their job.
@Edward Vullo, the resident would not have been a good citizen if that resident lied in a way that caused the police to respond with excessive force.
Does a “good” citizen have an obligation to give as accurate a report as possible to the police rather than embellishing the report with details that are questionable or outright false?
@ chair: That all goes without saying. My comment is based on the presumption that the citizen was just trying to a good citizen and report what he thought was legitimate suspicious activity, with no mention of embellishment of any report.
@Edward Vullo: Thanks, I’m with you then.
Taking Gavin Coe 100% at face value, there MAY (I am not a policeman so I’ll stand corrected if I’m wrong) be a difference between the way police respond to a report that says, “A suspicious person knocked at my door, and I’m worried that he was checking out my house to rob it,” and a report that says, “There’s someone in my neighborhood who is high and trying to break into multiple people’s houses.”
Note that in Gavin Coe’s example he says the police said he was trying to rob people. If that was the report, then it was given added drama by the caller, if all that happened was that he was asking to call his dad.
So instead of helping/ staying with the child they just shot, or call 911, they slammed his siblings on the ground for being upset. Cops exerting force on children, to show how “manly” they are? Is this why they won’t release the video? This is not going to stand.
bottom line Police are being trained to shoot first and figure it out later, dude jumps fense and enters The White House and the don’t kill him, go figure, its racially justified to kill a minority
Nothing else productive can happen until they release the video, because until then you have one side saying the officer was justified and you have the other side saying the officer murdered a child because of race. 1pm can’t come soon enough, then we can have clear evidence on this. You can’t shoot first and ask questions later.
If you do not comply with the police, they need to act to protect themselves and the public. This is common sense. Not racial. What is wrong with people?
This child posed a threat to the police, because it looks like they wanted him dead.
Damn near looks like a cop drive by they just didn’t keep driving. If the cop was so fearful why did he pull right up on a “dangerous suspect ” ? Forget good training the situation could have been avoided by using common sense
While this was a very sad event, the account given above doesn’t follow what is shown in the tape. According to the video, he was sitting alone before the police arrived. Puts the rest of the account in doubt as well.
“he and his friends went over to the RTA station across the street and a white man who was there called the police cause he must have seen the gun. they came running back to cudell rec. and were just sitting together when the police arrived. the police pulled their guns on the boy, his friends backed away, and he said it was just a BB gun w/ no bullets and went to lift his shirt to show it to them and they shot him twice in the stomach. in front of not only his friends, but also other children, and i believe his sister as well. his sister was screaming and the police slammed her down on the ground – they actually hurt her they were so aggressive. his brother also came onto the scene and was upset and the police slammed him on the ground as well.”
Absolutely NONE of this statement, except the fact that when the police arrived he pulled up his shirt showing the he had a gun, is supported by the video! He was by himself, he was waving the gun around, nobody is seen even being there interacting with him let alone being slammed to the ground. He pulled up his shirt before the officers had even exited the car. Shelly Gracon should be terminated from her internship for spreading lies while identifying her self as being with council, oh wait thats probably grounds for a full time job in council.
The above account was given to me word for word from two of Tamir’s close friends. Aside from the details of what they felt occurred was the story conveyed to me of who he was as a person. That narrative is in line with many other accounts as well. I stand by my actions, and with the grieving family and community of this boy. Peace.
I would like to add that when Tamir’s mother was told that the police shot her son she came running to the park and they wouldn’t let her near him. Again, this is from an eyewitness. No family were allowed to approach him.