The officer who shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014 in Cleveland has landed a new job as the sole police officer for Tioga, Pennsylvania, a town of 700 people in a region of the state popular with white nationalists.
HuffPost reports that Timothy Loehmann was sworn in to the job Tuesday. In the spring of 2014, Loehmann, as he jumped out of a moving police car, shot Tamir Rice, who was in a public park playing with a toy gun. An Ohio grand jury refused to indict Loehmann in the case.
Tioga Mayor David Wilcox said that he was “unaware” of Loehmann’s infamous history and that he had been led to believe that there were no issues with Loehmann’s background. “I found it strange that someone would move here all the way from Cleveland, Ohio, for $18 an hour,” Wilcox said. “But I heard that he wanted to get away from it all and come here to hunt and fish.”
Tioga County along with its neighbor, Potter County, is at the northern border of the state. The sparsely populated counties are popular with extremist groups, particularly white nationalists and outright Nazis, as a 2018 Washington Post report details.