3 police officers, 2 paramedics charged in 2019 death of Elijah McClain
A Colorado grand jury has charged three police officers and two paramedics in the death of Elijah McClain, a Black man who died after he was put in a chokehold and injected with a ketamine in a suburb of Denver two years ago.
Colorado attorney general Phil Weiser announced the charges of manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide against Officers Randy Roedema, Nathan Woodyard and Jason Rosenblatt, fire department paramedic Jeremy Cooper and fire Lt. Peter Cichuniec days after the two-year anniversary of McClain’s death.
McClain, 23, was stopped by Aurora police on the night of Aug. 24, 2019 while walking home from a convenience store after a 911 caller reported a man wearing a ski mask and waving his hands who seemed “sketchy.” McClain’s family said he suffered from anemia and wore the mask when he felt cold.
Body-camera footage shows officers stopping McClain “because [he was] being suspicious.” The officers begin to restrain him as McClain repeatedly tries to explain himself. After the cameras stop recording video, but continue recording audio, McClain cries and says he can’t breathe and was just on his way home.
“I’m just different. I’m just different, that’s all. That’s all I was doing. I’m so sorry. I have no gun. I don’t do that stuff. I don’t do any fighting. Why were you attacking me? I don’t do guns. I don’t even kill flies. I don’t eat meat. ... I am a vegetarian,” McClain pleads.
Eventually the video returns and shows McClain vomiting while laying on his side as another officer leans on him. A cop who arrived later threatened to get his police dog to bite McClain.
Paramedics then arrive and dose McClain with ketamine, a powerful sedative. While legal, the dosage was more than 1.5 times the amount for someone of McClain’s weight. Within several minutes, McClain stopped breathing and he died six days later after he was declared brain-dead and taken off life support.
A pathologist who conducted an autopsy later reported a combination of a narrowed coronary artery and physical exertion as contributing factors of McClain’s death.
A lawsuit from the family alleges that McClain died as a result of a dramatic increase of lactic acid in his blood caused by excessive force used by police over about 18 minutes, combined with the effects of the ketamine. They claim that police continued to “torture” McClain even after he was restrained, treatment they say is a result of the department’s history of “unconstitutional racist brutality.”
Roedema and Rosenblatt were also each charged with second-degree assault with intent to cause bodily injury and one count of a crime of violence related to the assault charge. Cooper and Cichuniec also both face three counts of second-degree assault.
Several officers involved in the case have since been fired.
Gov. Jared Polis ordered Weiser to open a new criminal investigation in 2020 after a district attorney had said in 2019 that he could not charge the officers because an autopsy could not determine how McClain died.
The attorney general’s office also is conducting a civil rights investigation into the Aurora Police Department, the first under a new police accountability law in Colorado, over a number of other alleged incidents of misconduct that may have been racially motivated.
With News Wire Services
