West Virginia police chief resigns after hiring officer who killed Tamir Rice
D.S. Teubert resigned as chief of the White Sulphur Springs Police Department after hiring Timothy Loehmann, Mayor Kathy Glover said.
The death of Rice, a 12-year-old Black child, at the hands of a White police officer helped fuel the Black Lives Matter movement.
“Chief of police Teubert voluntarily resigned his position as chief of police and voluntarily demoted himself to patrolman,” Glover announced at a City Council meeting Monday.
“Somebody failed us,” an attendee told the White Sulphur Springs City Council at the open meeting.
“Although I was not aware of the situation regarding the hiring, I still accept accountability as a leader of the city and this should not have happened,” Glover said.
“I accept that there are mistakes in the current process that we have, and those mistakes will be reviewed and changed moving forward.”
White Sulphur Springs is on the border of Virginia about 370 miles from Cleveland.
Loehmann resigned his position as a White Sulphur Springs probationary police officer last week, a statement from the mayor to CNN affiliate WVVA said.
Loehmann has made attempts to restart his law enforcement career before.
In 2018, he applied and then withdrew his application to the police department in Bellaire, a small town on the Ohio River, about 65 miles southwest of Pittsburgh, CNN affiliate WTOV-TV reported.
On November 22, 2014, Loehmann fatally shot Tamir Rice at a playground, three seconds after getting out of his patrol car, CNN reported.
Rice was holding a toy pistol. A witness called 911, reporting that an individual brandishing a firearm was in a park. The caller said the firearm was probably fake – but that information was not relayed to the dispatched officers. Loehmann was a trainee at the time.
An Ohio grand jury declined to criminally charge the officers in 2015, but Loehmann was fired in 2017 – not for the shooting, but because investigators found he wasn’t truthful about his employment history when he applied for the job.
CNN has attempted to contact Teubert and Glover for comment. Contact information for Loehmann was not immediately available, and an attorney who previously represented him did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.
At the City Council meeting, Glover mentioned that "us, as leaders, should have prevented this situation." Later, during the open meeting, an attendee expressed their sentiment by saying, "Somebody failed us, the community and us."
