The evidence shows that the 12-year-old boy grabbed a plastic replica gun from his waistband in the moment before a police officer fatally shot him outside a recreation center, McGinty told cleveland.com on Tuesday.

He has called the evidence "indisputable."

Assistant County Prosecutor Matthew Meyer explained how frame-by-frame analysis of surveillance video — handled by Grant Fredericks of Forensic Video Solutions in Spokane, Washington — revealed crucial facts about the November 2014 shooting at Cudell Recreation Center.

It came down to a small point of contrast seen just after officer Timothy Loehmann shot Tamir.

"You can actually see the gun after Tamir gets shot," Meyer said. "There's a point of contrast on the film that you can see, after [Tamir] collapses to the ground, the point of contrast appears on the concrete gazebo floor that had not been there before."

That point of contrast, prosecutors said, is the replica Colt 1911 that Tamir was seen aiming at people in the hours before someone called 911.

About 40 seconds after the gun appears on the gazebo floor, Loehmann's partner, Frank Garmback, walks to it and kicks it out of the way, Meyer said.

"The significance of that is this: for it to have fallen on the ground, it would have had to have been in Tamir's hand, which means he would have had to have pulled that gun out," he said. "Both officers had their weapons drawn on Tamir even though we know in hindsight he wasn't a real threat to them, which indicates they saw a gun or what they thought was a gun."

The images corroborated the written statement Loehmann recited to the grand jury, McGinty said.

"You could actually see [Tamir] draw his gun on this film," McGinty said. "We could not see it in the muddied [low-resolution] film."

A grand jury declined to charge Loehmann and Garmback after McGinty recommended against an indictment.

"We knew that ethically there couldn't be a trial in this case," he said.

Subodh Chandra, one of a team of lawyers representing the Rice family in a civil lawsuit against the city, department and the officers, said it is debatable whether Tamir is seen pulling the gun out of his waistband.

"That is hotly disputed," he said. "The prosecutor is literally just making that up. He's making it up to try to sell the public on what he's done. That is not true that it's undisputed."

So why, a lot of you have asked, have we chosen to turn off all comments on stories about Tamir Rice?

The simple answer is that we don't fancy our website as a place of hate, and the Tamir Rice story has been a magnet for haters.

We tried to maintain the conversation. The Tamir Rice case offers lessons for Greater Cleveland, and hashing out those lessons in an online community forum could be a healthy exercise. A lot of people firmly believe the police broke the law when they shot Tamir, but others feel just as strongly that the shooting was justified. Passions are strong, and because our comments section could provide a place for venting, we allowed comments on Tamir stories for months. We enlisted a small army on our staff to monitor the comments and delete any that violated our standards.

The trouble was that we couldn't keep up. Just about every piece we published about Tamir immediately became a cesspool of hateful, inflammatory or hostile comments. Rather than discuss the facts of the case, many commenters debased the conversation with racist invective. Or they made absurd statements about the clothing and appearance of people involved in the story. Or they attacked each other for having contrasting viewpoints. In many cases, well over half of the comments on Tamir stories broke our rules and had to be deleted.

We ultimately decided that the comments sections of Tamir stories, overrun as they were by wickedness, were not contributing to the needed conversation. In early October, we reluctantly and finally decided to close down the comments on any news story about Tamir.