By Brad Brooks
LONGMONT, Colorado (Reuters) – A Colorado judge is scheduled on Friday to sentence a paramedic convicted in the 2019 death of Elijah McClain, a young Black man who died after police put him in a chokehold and medics injected him with a powerful sedative.
Jurors in December found emergency medical worker Peter Cichuniec, 51, guilty of criminally negligent homicide in a rare trial of paramedics in such a case. He faces up to 16 years in prison.
Cichuniec’s partner, Jeremy Cooper, 49, was also found guilty of criminally negligent homicide and faces sentencing at the end of April.
Their joint trial was the last of three stemming from the death of McClain, who was not alleged to have committed any crime when officers stopped him.
One police officer was found guilty of criminally negligent homicide and sentenced to 14 months in jail. Two others were acquitted.
Police confronted McClain in Aurora, near Denver, on the night of Aug. 24, 2019, after a bystander called 911 to report the man was dressed in a winter coat and ski mask on a warm night and was acting suspiciously as he walked home from a convenience store.
Police slammed McClain on the ground soon after 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.
The original autopsy conducted on McClain in 2019 found the cause of death to be “undetermined.” But a revised autopsy report in 2021 concluded McClain died from “complications of ketamine administration following forcible restraint.”
Local prosecutors initially declined to file charges in the McClain case. That changed following the May 2020 killing of George Floyd, a Black man who died at the hands of Minneapolis police.
After Floyd’s death ignited global protests, 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.
McClain’s mother Sheneen McClain has said that “three out of five convictions are not justice” and urged Judge Mark Warner to give the maximum sentences possible to all those convicted.
(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Longmont, Colorado; Editing by Donna Bryson and Cynthia Osterman)
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