The Justice Department (DOJ) will not reopen the federal investigation into the death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was shot by police in Cleveland in 2014.
The department notified Samaria Rice, Tamir’s mother, following her participation in a federal training event for state prosecutors on investigating police misconduct cases, according to The Associated Press.
Attorneys for Samaria Rice previously wrote to DOJ officials in an effort to renew interest in a federal probe into her son’s death.
One of their letters included signatures from 50 scholars on constitutional, criminal and civil rights law who said the case deserved additional scrutiny, the AP reported.
But in a letter to the Rice family, Kristin Clarke, who heads the department’s Civil Rights Division, said “by no means should you view the department’s 2020 decision as an exoneration,” the wire service added.
In 2020, federal prosecutors decided not to charge the officers involved in Rice’s death after it was determined that the video of the shooting was too poor quality to determine what exactly happened.
The DOJ began its investigation into the case in 2015 after a grand jury declined to bring charges against the officers involved in the shooting.
The Hill has reached out to the Justice Department for comment.
On Nov. 22, 2014, Rice, who was Black, was playing with a pellet gun outside of a Cleveland recreation center when a white police officer shot and killed him. The officers on the scene were responding to a 911 call that a “guy” was pointing a gun at people.
Though the caller said that the person was likely a juvenile and the gun could be “fake,” the officers reportedly never received that information ahead of the shooting.
Last year, when Rice’s family pleaded with the DOJ to reopen the case, they argued that the Trump administration had purposely thwarted the investigation as a result of political motives.
Specifically, they accused Trump’s DOJ of providing a “self-serving memo to try to explain its decision by deceptively making this case seem complicated and difficult to prosecute.”
Around the same time, Democrats also encouraged the DOJ to reopen the case, accusing the Trump administration of mishandling the investigation.