If you think that the city of Cleveland and its law department couldn’t handle the Tamir Rice case any worse than it has, well, we have news for you.

The city filed a creditor’s notice against the estate of Tamir Rice looking for a past due amount of $500. 

What’s that $500 for?

It’s “owing for emergency medical services rendered as the decedent’s last dying expense under Ohio Revised Code.”

“That the city would submit a bill and call itself a creditor after having had its own police officers slay 12-year-old Tamir displays a new pinnacle of callousness and insensitivity,” one of Rice’s family attorneys, Subodh Chandra, told Scene this afternoon. “The kind of poor judgment that it takes to do such a thing is nothing short of breathtaking. Who on earth would think this was a good idea and file this on behalf of the city? This adds insult to homicide.

“The mayor and law director should apologize to the Rice family and withdraw this filing immediately,” he added.

The city has already had to apologize once in this case, back in March when in a pretty routine legal filing in the case, the city’s law department wrote that Tamir caused his own death. Frank Jackson apologized for the “insensitive language” they used.

The filing can be viewed in the PDF below.

2016-0210 Creditor's Claim


This article appears in Feb 10-16, 2016.

Vince Grzegorek has been with Scene since 2007 and editor-in-chief since 2012. He previously worked at Discount Drug Mart and Texas Roadhouse.

10 replies on “The City of Cleveland Filed a Probate Court Creditor’s Claim Against Tamir Rice’s Estate for $500”

  1. The political system spits on graves for a fast buck. Please pay in cash — if the city employees are not on another “coffee” break.

  3. At least the city did not charge for the bullets used to kill Tamir.

    Would be interesting to see if this is an established practice, or is it an effort to somehow thwart the civil suit.

  4. Wait, something really doesn’t add up. According to that statement, $500 was credited to the account, but there was a sudden, unexplained “Revenue Adjustment” of $500 at the end, that’s extremely suspicious.

  5. First Flint bills its people for the poisoned water it’s sending them. Cleveland goes even further. You get some kind of prize for the worst city in this part of the galaxy. Every city employee who had any part in this shameful action needs to take a good long look in the mirror. And then resign.

  6. On top of this grievous insult, they published the home address of the boy,
    inviting harassment. Cleveland has learned nothing. Still the mistake on the lake, no matter how good downtown looks, no matter how many conventions it has. This says everything you need to know.

  8. What kind of insane, hateful, cruel jerks would do this to the family of a murdered child?

    You are the worst people. You are indescribably hideously immoral, hateful people.

    May all those who participated in this twisted, twisting exercise in diminishing the value of a child’s life experience every iota of the pain that you have caused. Good lord, you are irredeemable scum.

  9. Do you think any sort of journalistic ethics requires that you disclose that the author of this article is best friends with one of the lawyers representing the Rice estate?

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