Hire of Tamir Rice’s killer exposed feuds in Tioga

Real quick: After Tioga hired the cop who killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice, long-simmering personal grudges and infighting exploded and brought local government in the tiny Pennsylvania borough to a halt.

A little more: Standing in a nondescript corner of the Tioga Borough Council Room, Mayor David Wilcox read from a printout of the Pennsylvania police oath and swore in his small town’s new police officer. A few feet away, a clean-shaven man raised his right hand and took the pledge.

One day later, Wilcox stood on the back of a pickup truck in the parking lot outside the municipal building and told dozens of protesters he was deceived by the Borough Council, and that he knew nothing about the man he had inducted as Tioga’s only police officer the day before.

That man was Timothy Loehmann.

Loehmann shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice — a Black boy who was playing with a toy gun at a park — in Cleveland in 2014. The shooting prompted national outrage and several nights of protest in Cleveland and other cities, but a grand jury declined to indict Loehmann. He was later fired for failing to disclose that his prior employer had deemed him unfit for duty.

Eight years later and 300 miles east, that history would thrust remote Tioga borough and its 700 residents into an intense but fleeting national limelight. But the story of what led to the controversial decision, and what it revealed about this place and its leaders, hasn’t been told — until now.

Read Spotlight PA's full investigation, Broken Borough, here.

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