A jury has convicted one Colorado police officer and acquitted another for the 2019 homicide of Elijah McClain, a 23-year-old whose death at the hands of law enforcement while on a walk home sparked international outrage and years of protests.
A jury found Randy Roedema, an Aurora police department (APD) officer, guilty of criminally negligent homicide and third-degree assault on Thursday. A second officer, Jason Rosenblatt, was found not guilty of manslaughter and assault. Both had held him on the ground and ignored his cries saying he couldn’t breathe. A third officer, who was the first to approach McClain, is also facing charges and has an upcoming trial.
Convictions of officers are rare in the US, and the verdicts come after McClain’s family and racial justice advocates have been fighting for four years for the officers to be held accountable and for systematic reforms to prevent future killings.
On the evening of 24 August 2019, McClain, a massage therapist, was walking home from a convenience store and listening to music on headphones, when a passing driver called 911, saying McClain “looks sketchy” and “might be a good person or a bad person”. The caller noted McClain was waving his arms and wearing a ski mask, which his mother later said he used to keep warm because he was anemic. The caller said he didn’t see any weapons and was not in danger, nor was anyone else.
Body-camera footage showed Officer Nathan Woodyard immediately shouting and grabbing McClain, saying: “I have a right to stop you because you’re being suspicious.” Roedema and Rosenblatt soon arrived and the three surrounded him. McClain responded, “I’m an introvert. Please respect the boundaries that I’m speaking … I’m going home.”
The three tackled him to the ground and Roedema then claimed McClain had reached for Rosenblatt’s gun, but the officer later said he did not feel any contact with his weapon. The officers placed McClain in a neck hold and put their body weight on him as the young man repeatedly apologized and also said “I can’t breathe” at least seven times.
At one point he said, “Why are you attacking me? I don’t even kill flies. I don’t eat meat.” He vomited multiple times while restrained and lost and regained consciousness. The officers accused the 5ft 7in, 140-pound McClain of having “incredible strength” and being “on something”, and when two paramedics arrived, they injected him with 500mg of ketamine, a powerful sedative. One of the paramedics estimated McClain’s weight to be 190 pounds when choosing the dangerously high quantity.
McClain subsequently went into cardiac arrest and never awoke. In the immediate aftermath, the police chief said that “overall the officers did a good job”, and the coroner ruled the cause of death as “undetermined”, partially blaming McClain’s “physical exertion” and “agitated behavior and enhanced strength”. The local prosecutor declined to file charges in November 2019.
The case was only revived after George Floyd’s murder led to a nationwide uproar about police violence. A new independent investigation into McClain’s death concluded that the police had no basis to restrain him, and an amended autopsy said he died from “complications of ketamine administration following forcible restraint”.
A grand jury indicted five first responders for manslaughter in 2021. All have pleaded not guilty, and this was the first trial. Woodyard, the other officer, and the two paramedics, Jeremy Cooper and Peter Cichuniec, have separate trials scheduled for later this year.
Roedema has been suspended without pay since the indictment. Rosenblatt was fired in 2020 after text messages revealed that three officers sent him a joking selfie re-creating the chokehold, and he replied “ha ha”.
At the three-week trial, in front of a jury that appeared to be mostly white, prosecutors argued the stop was unjustified and the use of force was excessive and violated policies restricting how neck holds can be applied. The officers’ lawyers argued that they followed their training, and blamed the paramedics for injecting ketamine.
It was not immediately clear why the jury, which had been deliberating since Tuesday, had divergent verdicts for the two officers. The state’s indictment specified that Roedema, who was convicted, had grabbed McClain’s bag and thrown it on the ground without examining its contents, which were cans of iced tea; the officer also told investigators that he had “cranked pretty hard” on McClain’s shoulder while twisting his arm, and heard it pop three times. Rosenblatt acknowledged that he had placed McClain in a neck hold, and prosecutors said he had also remained on top of McClain while he couldn’t breathe.
Roedema faces up to four years in prison and will be sentenced in January.
The killing of McClain, an animal lover who had taught himself to play violin, became a symbol of how US police forces criminalize and dehumanize young Black people who pose no threat, rush to use violent and lethal force, and immediately blame victims for their own deaths.
The case also prompted policy debates and reform measures across the US, including widespread scrutiny of the pseudoscientific diagnosis of “excited delirium”, which officials initially cited in explaining McClain’s death. The condition is not recognized by the American Psychiatric Association or the American Medical Association and posits that people can become overly aggressive and develop “superhuman strength” after ingesting certain drugs, such as meth or cocaine (neither of which McClain had used); the term has frequently been used to argue that victims of brutal force caused their deaths at the hands of police, particularly Black men. California recently became the first state to ban the term.
Since McClain’s death, Colorado has also restricted the use of ketamine to sedate people and passed a bipartisan police accountability bill that led to stricter use-of-force policies, wider disclosure of body-camera footage and a database of officer misconduct. The state now has oversight of the Aurora police department after an investigation uncovered a pattern of biased policing and use of excessive force.
Candice Bailey, an activist who grew up in Aurora and has long been fighting for justice for McClain’s family, said the reforms felt like “Band-Aids on bullet wounds”, noting recent scandals at the APD. That includes an officer’s conviction for failing to intervene as her partner strangled a detained man; claims an officer assaulted a woman with disabilities as she walked her dog; and an officer’s fatal shooting of a 14-year-old boy who was accused of shoplifting.
As news of the verdict spread, Bailey said people were disappointed and angry at the partial conviction: “Justice was not delivered by any stretch of the imagination. These two people carried out the same heinous murder together.”
She said the trial had been painful to absorb: “Watching them paint this as if Elijah McClain incited his own murder is absolutely dumbfounding and disgusting … Elijah was so gentle and loving and kind. He was a vegan. He loved to play violin to cats. He was a masseuse who healed people’s bodies for a living. He was in his own neighborhood walking home after getting a snack. He did absolutely nothing wrong and he died because of a culture in policing.”
Lindsay Minter, a community organizer in Aurora, said after the verdict that she was outraged that one officer was acquitted and that neither were convicted for more serious manslaughter charges.
“I’m appalled. This is not enough for the murder of Elijah McClain,” she said, adding that “negligent homicide” did not capture the gravity of the officers’ actions that day. “There is no accountability for killing a Black life. Black lives don’t matter here in Aurora. It’s horrible to know that I live in a county that thinks this is OK.”
