By Brad Brooks
LONGMONT, COLORADO (Reuters) – A former Colorado police officer was sentenced to 14 months in prison for his role in the 2019 killing of Elijah McClain, a young Black man who was not suspected of any crime when police roughly restrained him and paramedics injected him with a powerful sedative.
Former Aurora police officer Randy Roedema, 41, who faced up to three years in prison, was found guilty by a jury in October of criminally negligent homicide and third-degree assault. The same jury found fellow police officer Jason Rosenblatt, 35, not guilty in a joint trial.
Judge Mark Warner sentenced Roedema to 14 months in prison for the third-degree assault conviction and fours years of probation for criminally negligent homicide.
“The court was shocked by what appeared to be really indifference to Elijah McClain’s suffering,” Warner said before issuing the sentence.
There were three trials in total involving McClain’s death.
In a second trial, Aurora police officer Nathan Woodyard, 34, was found not guilty of manslaughter in November.
The third trial saw paramedics Jeremy Cooper, 49, and Peter Cichuniec, 51, found guilty of criminally negligent homicide in a trial last month. They will be sentenced on March 1.
BRUTAL CONFRONTATION
Police confronted McClain after a bystander called 911 to report the man dressed in a winter coat and ski mask on a warm night was acting suspiciously as he walked home from a convenience store.
Police laid hands on McClain within seconds of stopping him and put him in a carotid chokehold at least twice. He vomited into his ski mask and repeatedly told officers he could not breathe.
During Roedema and Rosenblatt’s trial, defense attorneys played body camera audio in which Roedema can be heard yelling that McClain had tried to grab Rosenblatt’s gun. The police treatment of McClain escalated sharply after that.
Prosecutors noted that there was no video showing any grab for a gun and suggested during the trial that Roedema was lying or mistaken.
The original autopsy conducted on McClain in 2019 found the cause of death to be “undetermined.” A revised autopsy report in 2021 concluded McClain died from “complications of ketamine administration following forcible restraint.”
Local prosecutors initially declined to file charges. That changed following the May 2020 killing of George Floyd, a Black man who died at the hands of Minneapolis police.
Colorado Governor Jared Polis in June 2020 asked the state attorney general’s office to investigate McClain’s case. A state grand jury indicted the officers and paramedics in 2021.
(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Longmont, Colorado; Additional reporting by Andrew Hay; editing by Donna Bryson and Cynthia Osterman)
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