Tamir Rice, 12, was with his sister and a friend in a gazebo in a Cleveland park on Saturday when a rookie cop shot him in the chest. He was playing with a gun that fired plastic pellets, but looked dangerously real.
Someone had called local police and reported seeing "a guy with a pistol, and it's probably fake … but he's pointing it everybody."
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Tamir did not die until early on Sunday morning. Later on in the morning CNN was having a roundtable discussion about the tension in Ferguson, Missouri, where the community fears violence might break out should a grand jury decide not to lay charges against another cop who shot dead another unarmed young black man, Michael Brown.
One of those on the CNN panel was Jim Wallis, a Christian social justice activist. There is no suggestion he had even heard of Tamir Rice when he spoke, but he could have been talking about him.
"Every African American dad that I know has the talk with their son about how to deal with being in the presence of a white policeman with a gun," he said. "I am a white dad … I won't have that talk with my two white sons."
It is not known what colour the Cleveland police were, though others have noted that the problem in America is not between young black men and white police, but young black men and police in general.