#TyreKing: 13-Year-Old Killed by Police Mourned at Vigil

A pastor led the crowd in prayer and said what happened to King wasn't right.

The Associated Press reports police shot Tyre King during a confrontation in an alley Wednesday night.

King's death comes almost two years after the fatal shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was black, by a white Cleveland police officer responding to reports of a suspect with a gun in a city park.

An officer-involved shooting in Columbus, Ohio, yesterday (September 14) left a 13-year-old boy dead.

This family photo provided by Walton + Brown LLP shows Tyre King.

The officer is a well-respected policeman who did what he had to do in that circumstance, Jason Pappas, head of the local police union representing Mason, said Friday.

Witnesses told police that a group of people had robbed a man of $10 (£7.60).

Maryam Abidi, of the OSU (Ohio State University) Coalition for Black Liberation, called the shooting "yet another example of the racist institution of policing".

In keeping with department policy, Mason has been placed on leave while the shooting is investigated. In 2012, while responding to a 911 call at a Columbus home, he fatally shot an armed man, Weiner said.

Rice had been drawing an airsoft gun from his waistband when Officer Timothy Loehmann, who is white, fired the fatal shots within two seconds of arriving outside a recreation center where the sixth-grader was on a playground, a prosecutor said.

(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. Investigators cleared Mason of any wrongdoing in that case, according to the paper. King later died in a hospital.

Sean Walton emphasised that Tyre did not have any violent criminal history.

Attorneys for King's family said the child enjoyed playing sports - football, hockey, soccer - and called for a thorough, "unbiased" investigation.

Neither Ohio nor the city of Columbus restrict possession of guns like BB guns - which use air instead of gunpowder to project ammunition - by age.

"There are allegations that have been made regarding his actions, and those allegations can not be taken as factual until a thorough, unbiased investigation has taken place", Sean Walton, one of the lawyers with the family, said. The boy also had a slight build and, if anything, was on the small side for his age, the attorney says. "It turns out not to be a firearm in the sense it fires real bullets, but as you can see, it looks like a firearm that can kill you".

In that case, the grand jury concluded that the officer and his partner reasonably believed that it was a real gun and that their lives were in danger, prosecutors said. As police chased them into an alley, one of the suspects, King, grabbed his BB gun and was shot, read the report. A rookie officer shot the boy nearly immediately after pulling up in his auto.

"Officers followed the males to the alley ... and attempted to take them into custody when one suspect pulled a gun from his waistband", police added.

After the crime unit investigated the scene, they discovered that the weapon in King's possession originally thought to be a regular handgun was a BB gun with a laser sight attached to it.

The suspect, later identified as Tyre King, was taken to a hospital, where he died.