Boy, 13, fatally shot by police after pulling out BB gun

The attorneys for the boy’s family said they wouldn’t comment on whether he had a gun or tried to pull one as facts are gathered. A rookie officer shot the boy nearly immediately after pulling up in his cruiser. A pastor led the crowd in prayer and said what happened wasn’t right. Their coach describes the first-year player as someone with a “smile that could light up the room”. The shooting will be investigated by Columbus detectives and presented to a grand jury by a local prosecutor, officials said.

This item has been corrected to show the boy was part of a youth football team, not a school football team.

The mayor cited “easy access to guns, whether they are firearms or replicas”, as a serious problem, adding, “A 13-year-old is dead in the city of Columbus because of our obsession with guns”.

How exactly King acted before he was shot dead is not known at the moment, the family said, and called for an independent investigation.

The chief and Mayor Andrew Ginther expressed condolences to the boy’s family and called for calm, saying the investigation into whether the officer’s gunfire was justified will take time. Police say he pulled a real-looking weapon from his waistband and was shot repeatedly.

The boy, Tyre King, died at a hospital after an officer shot him several times Wednesday evening outside a house in east-central Columbus, police said.

The police pursuit that night stemmed from a report from an alleged robbery victim, police said.

“He’s shooting him”, the witness said.

No one else was hurt. When they arrived, they ordered two of them, King and 19-year-old Demetrius Braxton, to get down. A call to the head of the police union representing him was not immediately returned.

“Our officers carry a gun that looks practically identical to this weapon”, she said. They provided no further information about him.

(AP Photo/Jay LaPrete). Members of Tyre King’s family console each other during a vigil for 13-year-old Tyre King Thursday, Sept. 15, 2016, in Columbus, Ohio. Walton would not discuss any previous dealings Tyre had with police but said the boy had no violent criminal history.

Reports indicate, the pistol with a laser sight attached to the barrel is a bb gun.

Relatives are still grieving and working on the funeral arrangements, Sean Walton, an attorney for the family of Tyre, said Friday morning. One of the most scrutinized cases, and one of the most similar to the one in Columbus, also took place in OH: the 2014 death of Tamir Rice, 12, who was playing with a pellet gun in a Cleveland park.

Chief Kim Jacobs said Thursday that investigators don’t yet have enough facts about the Wednesday night death of 13-year-old Tyre King to know how it relates to other cases.

Groups in Columbus rallied again in July when the issue of violence involving police was pushed back into the national consciousness after officers fatally shot black men in Baton Rouge and near St. Paul, Minnesota, and a gunman killed five Dallas police officers.

There was no chase in Tamir’s case.

In a 911 call reporting a robbery, a witness can be heard telling the dispatcher that a man had been robbed by a group of about seven or eight people.

“It turns out to not be a firearm in the sense that it fires real bullet, but as you can see it looks like a firearm that could kill you”, Jacobs continued.

He was shot in a Columbus alley around nightfall Wednesday.

A short time later, police saw three men matching the description. Two ran away, and the officers followed them into an alley and went to take them into custody, police said.

Tyre was black. The officer is white and a nine-year veteran of the force. She held up an image of what she said the BB gun looked like, displaying it for reporters at the news conference outside City Hall.

Police in OH responding to a report of an armed robbery shot and killed a boy who they said pulled a gun from his waistba.

It happened Wednesday night in Columbus. One of them reportedly had a gun. He said that King was a typical 13-year-old boy who would have had no reason to act the way the police are saying and it would be “out of his normal character”.

Thirteen-year-old Tyre King shot and killed by officer who says BB gun looked like a real weapon.

Activist Anthony Edgecombe (center) speaks about the death of Tyre King at a vigil hosted by the Ohio State Coalition for Black Liberation on September 15.