That is disingenuous. Grand jurors, almost without exception, follow where prosecutors lead them. And when they don’t return indictments in high-proﬁle cases, it’s almost always because the prosecutor does not want them to. That he makes that preference known, whether explicitly or implicitly, in the secret conﬁnes of the grand-jury room makes it no less deliberate.

Since he took office, in January 2013, McGinty has presented, or has promised to present, evidence related to every police killing of a civilian in Cuyahoga County—20 in three years—to a grand jury. The reason, he repeated after the December non-indictment, was to increase transparency, to “end the traditional system where the prosecutor privately reviewed police reports, then decided if an officer should be charged. That secrecy—which appeared arbitrary without a public investigative report—undermined community conﬁdence.”

But there is nothing in that traditional system—which remains the system for everyone except, apparently, police officers—that requires reviews to be done privately. McGinty can distribute public records; he can consult outside experts and release their analyses; he can even publish a 74-page report explaining why he decided a shooting was justiﬁed or not. That is, after all, the job he was elected to do.

Grand-jury proceedings, on the other hand, are by law secret. (McGinty’s office, in fact, stressed that point: Clark and other witnesses “can characterize their experience before the Grand Jury in any way they want, but prosecutors cannot reveal what was said or done in the room,” a spokesman e-mailed me. “So by deﬁnition, you’re only getting one side.”) What evidence is presented and how is not a matter of public record. Nor is whether a witness is treated with deference or, to borrow phrasing from that 74-page report, as one of the “purported experts” hired by lawyers “representing the Rice family in a federal civil lawsuit.” Only the beginning and the end of the process—the apparently reckless shooting of a black child and the grand jury’s decision that that killing was not unreasonable—are truly public. Everything in between is either cloaked in legal secrecy or dribbled out in carefully choreographed press releases. And when it’s over, when the details are sufficiently blurred and the story is effectively muddled, the prosecutor can take refuge behind those anonymous grand jurors when he declares the whole episode to be nothing more than a sad accident.

That’s how a dead child, how Tamir Rice, eventually becomes a half-remembered name on a long and miserable list of other half-remembered names. When strangers think of him, if they think of him, it will be with a weary sigh as they try to sort out which one he was, and where. Maybe they will recall something about a toy gun and the cops thinking it was real and, well, mistakes happen—because isn’t that what the grand jury’s decision effectively meant?

Yes, it is. And this is how they were led to that conclusion.

The park where Tamir got shot is a couple hundred yards from where he lived, in a row house across Madison Avenue on the west side of Cleveland. Samaria had moved to that neighborhood the previous March partly because Cudell park was so close. There was a rec center on the north side, where Tamir and his sister had been going for years, and there was a school on the south side, where Tamir was in the sixth grade. Samaria would check the park every now and again, make sure no dope boys were loitering about. But between that and the school and the rec center, she ﬁgured her children were safe.

Tamir was at Cudell by midmorning on the Saturday he got shot. Usually he’d play basketball or Ping-Pong or games on an old phone that could connect to the rec-center Wi-Fi. But his friend had an Airsoft pellet gun his dad bought him at Walmart, a replica of a Colt 1911 semi-automatic. It was supposed to have an orange tip on the barrel, except it stopped working once and Tamir’s friend took it apart and ﬁxed it but couldn’t get the orange part back on. They traded, Tamir and his friend, a cell phone for the pellet gun, but only for the day: Tamir knew he’d catch hell if his mom found out he was playing with a toy gun.

He shot BBs at a few car tires in the parking lot, showed his friend how they didn’t go straight. He knew enough to put the gun in his backpack when he went inside the rec center, though. He was there almost every day, never caused a problem and wasn’t going to start.

Courtesy of the Rice family

Samaria gave Tamir and his sister turkey sandwiches and fruit when they came home for lunch, and a few dollars to get chips and juice from the corner store. Then they went back to Cudell. Tamir was inside the rec center for a while, then outside, back and forth for more than an hour. On the sidewalk out front, he played with the pellet gun, drawing and pointing at pretend people and, sometimes, real people. No one seemed alarmed, though. Everyone knew Tamir, knew he was a kid, knew he was playing. Even if they didn’t, Tamir didn’t appear menacing: A man named Joe who was 81 and came to practice with an old-timers’ basketball league saw Tamir pointing his gun at the ground only a few feet away and just ignored him.

A little after three o’clock, a guy with a tall-boy showed up in the park to wait for a 3:30 bus downtown. He didn’t know Tamir. He saw a baby-faced guy, ﬁve feet seven, almost 200 pounds—Tamir was a big kid—pulling a gun in and out of his pants. Acting all gangsta, he thought. The man called 911 at 3:22. He was a little slurry, but not frantic. He politely asked the operator how she was, then told her he was sitting in a park. “There’s a guy in here with a pistol,” he said, “and, you know, it’s probably fake, but he’s, like, pointing it at everybody.” The operator asked him where he was, exactly, and the caller repeated what he said the ﬁrst time: “The guy keeps pulling it in and out of his pants—it’s probably fake, but you know what? He’s scaring the shit out of me.” He described Tamir’s clothes and then reported the guy with the pistol had moved to one of the swings on the playground. “Probably a juvenile, you know?” Finally: “He’s right nearby the, you know, the youth center or whatever, and he keeps pulling it in and out of his pants. I don’t know if it’s real or not.”