An undated photo of Tamir Rice, who was killed by police. Photo: New York Times

Cleveland: The death of a 12-year-old Cleveland boy fatally shot by police in November has been formally ruled a homicide, according to a county autopsy report released on Friday that found he was struck once in the abdomen.

Tamir Rice, who was black, was shot on November 22 by a white police officer responding to a call of a suspect waving a handgun around in a Cleveland park. The weapon turned out to be a replica that typically fires plastic pellets. The sixth-grader died the next day.

The Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner's autopsy report said Rice sustained a single wound to the left side of his abdomen that travelled from front to back and lodged in his pelvis

Homicide case: A program used during the funeral service for Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio, on December 3. Rice had an Airsoft-type replica gun that resembles a semi-automatic pistol and was fatally shot by a patrol officer. Photo: Reuters

The shooting came at a time of heightened national scrutiny of police use of force and two days before a grand jury declined to indict a white police officer in the August 9 fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

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Rice was shot less than two seconds after the police car pulled up beside him in the park, police have said. They also released a security video of Ricein the park before and during the shooting.

Rice was 1.7 metres tall and 88 kilograms, according to the autopsy report.

Rice's mother, Samaria Rice, said on Monday the officers involved should be convicted. The family filed a lawsuit last week against the city of Cleveland and the two officers involved in Rice's shooting, who are on administrative leave.i

The officer who shot Rice, Timothy Loehmann, had been on the Cleveland force for less than a year. A second officer, Frank Garmback, was driving the car. Both officers are white.

A grand jury investigates all police shootings in Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland.

The shooting of Rice, and grand jury decisions not to indict officers in the deaths of Brown or a black man who was put in a chokehold during an arrest in New York, have driven protests over the police use of force in the United States.

A national coalition of civil rights groups, led by the families of Brown, Rice, as well as Trayvon Martin, the Florida teen who died after being shot by a white vigilante in 2012, are expected to march in Washington DC on Saturday (US time) to protest police violence and to call for legislation against what they see as insitutionalised discrimination.

Cleveland's police force has been under a US Department of Justice investigation, which found in a report released on December 4 that the department systematically engages in excessive use of force.

In a separate case, the FBI will investigate the hanging death of a black teenager in North Carolina, the agency said on Friday, after his family questioned the finding by local authorities that it was a suicide.

The body of Lennon Lacy, 17, was found hanging from a swing set in a park in Bladenboro, a small town about 240 kilometres south-east of Charlotte.

Shelley Lynch, a Charlotte-based spokeswoman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, confirmed the agency was reviewing the case at the request of the US Attorney's office in Raleigh.

The family and the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP had been pushing for the probe, citing concerns about the handling of the case and suspicions that the teen might have been murdered.

The high school football player's mother said she did not think her son, a shy teenager, would end his life "in such an exposed space, hanging from a swing set in plain view" of several trailer homes.

Lacy's relationship with an older white woman was well known in the community.

"We don't know what happened to my son three months ago, and suicide is still possible. But there are so many unanswered questions that I can't help but ask: Was he killed? Was my son lynched?" Claudia Lacy was quoted as saying in a commentary published on Friday in the US edition of The Guardian newspaper.

Reuters