All eyes are on an Aurora courtroom for the Elijah McClain case that began trial last week. McClain, a 23-year-old Black man, died four years ago during a violent encounter with Aurora police and paramedics. His death has had major reverberations in Colorado and far beyond.
The first trial underway involves two police officers charged in his death — Randy Roedema and Jason Rosenblatt. In total, three officers and two paramedics face charges that include criminally negligent homicide, manslaughter and assault. They have all pleaded not guilty.
KUNC reporter Rae Solomon covered McClain’s death and many of the developments that followed. Before we unravel some of those details, we asked Solomon who McClain was.
“By all accounts, he was a really creative and playful person,” Solomon told In the NoCo’s Erin O’Toole. “He worked as a massage therapist and played violin. His mother, Sheneen McClain, said that he was planning to go to art school. She described him as a really free spirit, a little bit eccentric — somebody who would just do handstands for no reason."
Solomon said he was "kind of a small guy, just 140 pounds." He was a vegetarian, and many described him as very gentle.
"He just kind of walked to his own beat,” Solomon said.
On the night of August 24, 2019, McClain was stopped by police on his way home from a convenience store. They were responding to a call about someone who looked “sketchy.” Police escalated things from there.
“In the bodycam footage, McClain is obviously scared,” Solomon said. “He tells police that he's an introvert. He says he was just going home. But the police, they just don't seem to hear him. And before you know it, McClain is on the ground and the officer has him in a neck hold. He tells them he can't breathe and then temporarily loses consciousness.”
These were just some of the many heartbreaking details from the footage.
When the paramedics arrived at the scene, police told them McClain had "incredible strength." That led one of the medics to inject McClain with ketamine — a key factor in McClain’s death.
“Ketamine is a common anesthetic, and it's pretty safe when it's used properly in a clinical setting,” Solomon explained. “But that's not what happened in McClain's case. Medics in the field vastly overestimated McClain's size, and they essentially gave him an overdose of the drug.”
The Question of Ketamine
Health care workers typically use ketamine to treat a rare and potentially fatal medical condition known as excited delirium. Solomon’s 2020investigation with former KUNC reporter Michael de Yoanna found a pattern of Colorado paramedics’ frequent use of ketamine to sedate people during police encounters.
In McClain's case, a few minutes after the paramedics administered him the ketamine, he lost consciousness. In the ambulance, medics realized he wasn't breathing and didn't have a pulse. They took him to a hospital where he died a few days later.
“Patients who have excited delirium get really agitated," Solomon said. "They lose control. They can't stop resisting. Their heart rate is really rapid and they can also show unusual strength. They can essentially physically exert themselves to death. But our investigation suggested paramedics in Colorado had been over-diagnosing excited delirium.”
Between 2018 and 2020, medics used ketamine to treat supposed excited delirium 902 times.
“If you do the math, that's about once a day,” Solomon said.
Solomon also found police often try to influence paramedics’ diagnoses of excited delirium and encourage them to use ketamine even when the situation does not warrant it.
Dr. Mark Debarred, who chaired the medical team that defined excited delirium and also established ketamine as a treatment for the condition, saw no signs of excited delirium in the police bodycam footage, Solomon said.
McClain's initial autopsy report did not determine his cause of death and pointed to several possible factors, including excited delirium. A revised autopsy report released in July 2021 showed a different cause of death: “complications of ketamine administration following forcible restraint.” The paramedics involved in administering the ketamine to McClain have a separate trial coming later this year.
A loss that spurred change
One thing that appears clear is how McClain's death helped catalyze pioneering police reforms in Colorado. Protesters took to the state Capitol for days following the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Many were also protesting McClain's death, chanting his name and holding signs.
State Rep. Leslie Herod told KUNClawmakers heard those cries “not only from folks protesting outside of the state Capitol in Denver, but from across the state.”
In response, Herod sponsored a sweeping bill that made Colorado ground zero for police reform.
“There's no other state legislator in this country that has been able to do what Colorado has done to date. It just hasn't happened,” criminologist Howard Henderson at the Center for Justice Research said.
But Colorado has been slow to comply with a crucial part of the law - releasingpoliceuse-of-force data.
Meanwhile, the McClain family is still waiting for justice. Amonths-long investigation released in 2021 found police officers and paramedics acted inappropriately at almost every point in their confrontation with McClain that day. KUNC spoke with McClain’s mother, Sheneen McClain, following the release of that report.
“Justice for me means everybody that was there, everybody that participated and everybody that did not de-escalate — they need to be fired. There needs to be criminal charges because there is negligence,” she said. “They have to be able to spend time in jail so that they understand the severity of their crime.”
The trial for Rosenblatt and Roedema is expected to last three weeks. Trials for the remaining three defendants, Nathan Woodyard, Jeremy Cooper and Peter Cichuniec, will happen later this year.
