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Tioga Borough council in Pennsylvania hired the former Cleveland police officer who murdered 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014, Timothy Loehmann, Tuesday night. However, after receiving backlash from local protesters and people on social media, Loehmann withdrew from the position.
Tioga Borough Council President Steve Hazlett posted an update about Loehmann’s position Thursday morning on his Facebook page but then deleted it, Press Connects reported
.“Effective this morning, Timothy Loehmann has officially withdrawn his application for the Tioga Borough police position,” the deleted post read. Hazlett confirmed the news by phone to USA TODAY.
Hazlett said the withdrawal was Loehmann’s idea.
Hazlett also deleted a 2015 post from his Facebook page on Thursday, in which he called Tamir “dumb.”
“Dumb enough to pull a fake gun, dumb enough to get shot,” the post read.
Dumb enough to leave the post up for seven years only to delete it when getting called out in the media, thinking no one was going to see it. It’s not a good look when a town council’s president calls an innocent Black child dumb and hires the same cop with an impulse to shoot a child without thinking of nonfatal ways to de-escalate a non-threatening issue.
In responding to a 9-1-1 call, Loehmann arrived at the scene and immediately shot and killed Tamir in 2014. In December 2020, Loehmann did not face any repercussions for killing an unarmed 12-year-old because the Department of Justice said that there was “insufficient evidence to support criminal charges.” The DOJ declined Samaria Rice, Tamir’s mother when she asked them to reopen the case on the same grounds.
Loehmann lost his position with the Cleveland police department not because he murdered Tamir, but because he lied on his job application. In 2018, he was hired to be a police officer for the town of Bellaire but rescinded his application to avoid causing trouble with protests.