CLEVELAND, Ohio -- In the final lines of a letter penned to her dead son on what would have been Tamir Rice’s 17th birthday, Samaria Rice promised him she would never let his death at the hands of a Cleveland police officer be in vain.

In that message, which was published in Essence magazine in June, Rice told her son that she knows he will be with her, every step of her fight for his legacy.

"Ask me how I know?" she wrote. "I feel you when I breathe."

Today marks five years since 12-year-old Tamir Rice was fatally shot by a Cleveland police officer while playing with a pellet gun in the park outside the Cudell Recreation Center on the city’s West Side. Tamir’s death anointed him as one of America’s youngest casualties of police use of deadly force against people of color, and his story continues to fuel the Black Lives Matter movement.

In a recent interview with cleveland.com, Samaria Rice spoke about her rocky path toward activism, the grief of the past half-decade, and what it takes to rise each morning and find meaning in her loss – one breath at a time.

Samaria Rice prays alongside her father, Eugene Rice, Sr., during a a candlelight vigil under the Cudell gazebo, on the first anniversary of Tamir Rice's slaying. (Photo by Lynn Ischay, The Plain Dealer)

Cudell

Samaria Rice recalls that day – Nov. 22, 2014 – in painful fragments. Some of the memories are crystal clear, such as the turkey sandwich and fruit she served Tamir and his sister, Tajai, for lunch before they departed for the rec center. Other details are clouded by the anguish of what came next.

Rice remembers riding in the passenger seat of the ambulance and the doctors rushing Tamir into surgery. She remembers the sense that her child was already gone, even while they gave him blood transfusions and connected him to life support. She also remembers that a cadre of police officers seemed to hover around Tamir’s hospital room, and that in the end, she was told she couldn’t touch her son’s body, because it had become evidence.

Samaria Rice had wanted more for her children than what she experienced in her own traumatic youth – a childhood she described as “a whirlwind of catastrophe” that gave rise to a young adulthood plagued by domestic violence, poverty and housing instability. She had done everything she could to provide her children’s lives with structure. She even settled her family in a West Side neighborhood that she thought was safer than most of the other places they had lived.

But the reach of multigenerational poverty and institutional racism can be long and pernicious. And Rice’s 12-year son couldn’t escape it.

Tamir was pronounced dead of his wounds at 12:54 a.m.

In 2015, a grand jury declined to indict Officer Timothy Loehmann for shooting Tamir, agreeing that his use of deadly force was reasonable under the perceived threat that Tamir was a grown man wielding a real gun. Loehmann eventually was fired from the Cleveland police department for lying on his job application, not for killing Tamir. The police union continues to stand by him and advocate for his reinstatement.

The following year, the city paid Rice $6 million to settle a wrongful death lawsuit. After paying attorneys’ fees and disbursing funds among family members, Rice was left with about $1.7 million. For Rice and her children, who will never fully heal from the loss of their brother, money is the coldest comfort, she says. While the settlement let her avoid years of painful litigation, it forced her to assign a dollar value to her son’s life, and it brought no justice for Tamir.

For that, she is still fighting.

Samaria Rice speaks during a rally in Washington D.C. in December 2014. (Photo by Sabrina Eaton, cleveland.com)

In public, a tireless activist

In the years since her son’s death, Rice, 42, has connected with a sorority of mothers from around the country, known as the “Mothers of the Movement,” who also have lost their sons to police use of deadly force. They support one another in text messages and phone calls and appear together at lecterns, panel discussions and protests. Rice also has been surrounded by activists and artists, who have helped her find ways to keep Tamir’s story alive in the public consciousness and to advocate for police reform in Cleveland and beyond.

Tamir’s likeness appears on murals throughout the world, including on a memorial in the Palestinian territories. Samaria Rice was featured in a documentary film called “Traveling While Black,” and she is involved in the production of another documentary about Tamir called “12.”

Last year, Chicago-based artist Michael Rakowitz created a Cleveland gallery installation called “A Color Removed,” for which he asked Clevelanders to contribute orange-colored objects. He assembled them into a striking statement about the emphasis placed on the pellet gun’s missing orange safety tip that would have signaled the gun was a replica, rather than a firearm. Rice, herself, created art for the installation.

Also, the gazebo under which Tamir was killed was temporarily relocated, under Samaria Rice’s direction, to artist Theaster Gates’ Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago, where it was dedicated as an outdoor installation in June.

Nearest Rice’s heart, however, are her hopes to raise enough money to transform a vacant building she has purchased on the city’s East Side into the Tamir Rice Afrocentric Cultural Center, an after-school program where Cleveland’s black youth could learn about their African descent through music, dance and visual art. Children at the center also would be matched with mentors and would learn about activism and civic engagement – lessons Rice says she was forced to learn on her own these past five years.

In a recent interview, Cleveland artist and activist Amanda King, who works for the Tamir Rice Foundation, said Tamir’s story is alive in the arts community because of Samaria Rice’s collaboration on dozens of projects in some of the top galleries and exhibitions in the country.

“I don’t know another black woman in America who has that kind of influence in the arts world,” King said.

Indeed, Rice has become an activist in high demand, with an exhausting schedule of speaking engagements and public appearances around the world. This year, she was named to Essence’s list of “Woke 100 Women” alongside Gayle King and Michelle Obama.

But all of that is what the world sees of Rice’s efforts to find meaning and to keep from drowning in grief.

Privately, the wounds are as raw as the day Tamir died. Because no matter how successful she is at building Tamir’s legacy and inspiring a national dialogue about police reform and racial inequality in America, this simple truth remains: It has been a long, lonely journey without her son … five Christmases without his joyful presence in her home … one thousand eight hundred twenty-five mornings, awaking to find him gone.

Samaria Rice passes by a display of photos of her son, Tamir, at his funeral in December 2014. (Photo by Lynn Ischay, The Plain Dealer.)

In private, a grieving mother

Rice now lives in Lorain County, where she says she has found some peace and privacy.

When she lived in Cleveland, Rice said, she would be recognized and approached nearly every day by strangers. Sometimes they wanted to give her a hug. Sometimes they wanted to share their own opinions of Tamir’s case. And other times, they would simply blurt out, “You’re the mother of that boy who got shot! Right?” Or they would confuse Tamir with Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old Florida boy who was shot and killed in 2012 by a vigilante neighborhood watchman.

But Rice seems to have escaped a lot of that in her new suburban neighborhood, where people keep to themselves, and Rice can sit in her backyard and listen to the fountain of her subdivision’s retention pond.

That peace, however, has its limits. Despite her burning motivation to create Tamir’s legacy, Rice acknowledges that she is exhausted and hasn’t slept a full night in five years. She often stays awake, reading, researching and writing – or sometimes just looking at photos of Tamir.

Rice says she has a collection of them that the world will never see, because they are all that she has left of him. But she shares two of them during this interview. One is of Tamir as a chubby-cheeked preschooler, holding his bundled infant niece. Another is of Rice and all her children, smiling and clinging to her.

“That’s when my kids were happy,” she says.

Her surviving kids are grown now. She is proud that all three graduated high school, despite the hardships they faced. They have children of their own, and Rice is helping to raise them.

But she agonizes over her children’s mental wellness. The trauma they endured from the violent loss of their brother is insurmountable without counseling, Rice believes. She herself has spent time in therapy through the years and is considering a more intensive mental health treatment plan to help her move forward, she says. Yet, she can’t quite convince her children to seek help, too. And because of that, she has watched them spiral into what she describes as a pattern of bad decisions.

She offers the example of her oldest son, who at the time of this interview was in jail, facing an assault charge. She had been trying to show him tough love, avoiding visitations while sending others to check on him. But she hadn’t heard from her son in a week, and she wondered why.

Then, during this interview, Rice’s son called collect from the Cuyahoga County jail, and she answered it on speakerphone. He explained that he had been out of touch because he had spent five days in “the hole,” for fighting with another inmate.

“I told you to stay out of trouble,” Rice said, rubbing her brow. “What was the fight about?”

“He was talking about Tamir,” her son responded. “He said that he deserved to die.”

“Boy, you should have walked away from that,” Rice said, before telling her son to sit down somewhere and collect himself, and promising they’d continue their conversation later.

Rice hung up the phone and sighed.

“See what I mean?” she said. “He has so much anger inside. And I just don’t know how to help him.”

Samaria Rice delivers petitions to the Cleveland Police Patrolmen's Association union. Those who signed the petition oppose the rehiring of former officer Timothy Loehmann, who shot and killed Rice's 12-year-old son, Tamir, in 2014. (Photo by Adam Ferrise, cleveland.com)

‘America made me who I am …’

Rice is angry too.

She says she had difficulty, in the days after Tamir’s death, accepting that a police officer would have killed her son. She had encountered police many times in her life and had always considered them public servants she could trust. So, when she finally viewed the surveillance video footage of Tamir’s shooting for the first time in the presence of her brother, her attorney and Chief of Police Calvin Williams, she collapsed with grief.

“Until then, I had been living a private life,” Rice said. “I had seen things on CNN about the deaths of Eric Garner or Michael Brown or Trayvon Martin, and I would think, ‘Oh, that’s awful!’ … Then I look up, and I see me. And I have no words for that feeling.”

In the years that followed, Rice steeped herself in the history of racial injustice and police brutality in America. She experienced a kind of painful awakening that gave context to her own life story and Tamir’s death and informed the path she would take as an activist.

“I’m angry and mad and sad and disappointed in America for selling me an American Dream that was a lie,” she said. “Because America has no dreams for black and brown people. I trust nobody. I'm damaged and broken, and America made me who I am.”

That anger is the reason Rice had Tamir’s body cremated and keeps his ashes at home in an urn, rather than choosing to spread them anywhere in Ohio.

And that anger is the reason she is still fighting for justice in Tamir’s case, even after a grand jury declined to indict the officer who pulled the trigger.

Rice makes the argument, for whomever will listen, that by all accounts the officers thought they were approaching an adult that November day. And in Ohio, an adult is legally permitted to openly carry a handgun in public spaces or obtain a permit to carry a concealed weapon.

“Why do I have a dead son in an open carry state?” Rice rhetorically asked. “If you thought he was an adult, did you think to ask him if he has a permit for a concealed weapon before you rode up like a cowboy in the Wild West?

“To hell with those officers,” she added. “I will never forgive them.”

Samaria Rice at the building that she hopes to one day transform into the Tamir Rice Afrocentric Cultural Center in her son's honor. (Photo by Lisa DeJong, The Plain Dealer)

The missing piece

On Wednesday evening, Rice appeared at the Cleveland Museum of Art, flanked by several other Mothers of the Movement, to commemorate – with art, music and dance -- the 5th anniversary of Tamir’s death. Rice wore shimmering gold evening attire. When she spoke, the audience listened with rapt attention and offered rousing applause when she vowed to continue serving as a catalyst for change and to “make it uncomfortable” for those who would prefer to ignore Tamir’s story.

Rice acknowledged in our interview that her life is dramatically different today than it was five years ago. Her circle of friends includes some of the world’s most influential artists and activists, attorneys and journalists.

But Rice is uncomfortable in the limelight. She would give it all back, she says, just to hold her son again. She would trade the hollow settlement payout and her prominence as an activist for the simple life she led with her kids. When they were happy.

“A piece of my puzzle will always be missing,” she said, touching her finger to an imaginary jigsaw puzzle on the table in front of her. “And there’s nothing I can do but fill that space with a lot of love and work. But it’s still not enough, because I would rather have my son back.”

Asked where she goes to feel close to Tamir or to commemorate his birthday or somber milestones like today, Rice surprisingly said she goes to the Cudell park, where her son spent his final moments.

“His spirit is there,” Rice explained. “I can feel him. He’s playing. I don’t have a special ritual or ceremony on those days. I’m just there to be near him. Just breathing.”

To support Samaria Rice’s vision for the Tamir Rice Afrocentric Cultural Center, visit https://ioby.org/project/developing-tamirs-center or donate through the Tamir Rice Legacy Fund, managed by the Cleveland Foundation. https://www.clevelandfoundation.org/give-now/?existing_select=tamir-rice-legacy-fund-exfund.