Samaria Rice, who has three other children, said she was in shock following the shooting and was angry "because Cleveland police have failed to come knock on my door and tell me what happened to my son.  The mother of a 12-year-old boy shot dead last month by Cleveland police after he was seen holding a toy gun said today the most agonizing moment was when she had to decide whether to go with her injured son to the hospital or stay at the recreation center playground to figure out why her daughter was in the back seat of a police car. But they wasn't telling me anything, just saying, 'Calm down, calm down," Samaria Rice said a news conference today, adding that her daughter told her later that police had tackled her before handcuffing her and placing in the back of the their vehicle near Tamir Rice’s body. The Cleveland police department didn't respond to messages seeking comment on Rice's allegations. Crump said surveillance video showing Loehmann and Frank Garmback arriving at the park and shooting Tamir is "enough probable cause to indict the police officer now." Cleveland Deputy Chief Ed Tomba said in November that a grand jury would hear the case because the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor's office, which is overseeing the case, has a policy of presenting all fatal police shootings to a grand jury.
– The mother of a 12-year-old boy shot dead while brandishing a toy gun wants authorities to skip the grand jury. At a press conference in Cleveland, the attorney for Samaria Rice urged prosecutors to avoid a grand jury trial and directly charge the officer who shot Rice's son Tamir in a park last month, NBC News reports. "There is nothing written anywhere in the law that says police officers are to be treated differently than any other citizen," says Benjamin Crump, who has also worked on the Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin cases. Crump's plea comes after nationwide protests derided grand juries that declined to charge white police officers who had killed Brown and Eric Garner, both of whom were black and unarmed. Rice says her tragedy began when two boys knocked on her door Nov. 22 saying an officer had shot Tamir twice in the stomach, ABC News reports. She ran to the park where Tamir lay on the ground, unattended by police, and saw her 14-year-old daughter in the back of a squad car (the daughter later said police had tackled and handcuffed her, Samaria adds). "I knew she was crying for me, but I couldn’t see her hands," says Samaria. She asked police what had happened but was only told to "calm down." Forced to choose between being with her older daughter and younger son, Samaria "of course ... [went] with the 12-year-old." Officers made her "sit in the front of the ambulance truck like I was a passenger" on the ride to the hospital, she says, where Tamir died the next day.