Tim Loehmann, the Cleveland city police officer that shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice, had failed a Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Department exam before becoming a cop in Cleveland, reported Talking Points Memo.
Months before becoming a policeman with the Cleveland Police Department, Loehmann took and failed a psychological exam administered by the Cuyahoga Sheriff’s Department in September 2013. According to Talking Points Memo, Loehmann scored 46 percent on the exam. The minimum passing score is 70 percent.
Although Loehmann passed the physical portion of his pre-employment process, the department denied Loehmann’s application and did not hire him. Between 2012 and 2014, when Loehmann began work in Cleveland, he had applied to different police agencies in the Ohio area.
Most damning about Loehmann’s past was his departure from the Independence Police Department in Independence, Ohio. According to the Indepence PD’s Deputy Chief Jim Polak, Loehmann had become unfit to continue as a police officer.
“He [Loehmann] could not follow simple directions, could not communicate clear thoughts nor recollections, and his handgun performance was dismal,” said Polak in a written memo.
The memo also described that Loehmann had been dealing with some personal, relationship issues, which could have caused the ill-fated officer’s downward spiral. That’s a very dangerous thing considering Loehmann was also “not mature enough in his accepting of responsibility or his understanding the severity of his loss of control on the gun range.”
Here we have a mentally- and emotionally-defective man who was finally given a job at the Cleveland Police Department, a police beat, and a gun.
With all the red flags in Loehmann’s past, it’s possible that the man either figured out how to lie on the Cleveland PD psych exam, or he never took one at all. Albeit, it’s still safe to assume that Cleveland PD didn’t properly look into Loehmann’s background.
This all resulted in the death of a child.
