AURORA — Prosecutors for the state of Colorado laid responsibility for Elijah McClain’s death four years ago squarely on the shoulders of two Aurora police officers as their jury trial opened Wednesday, while the officers’ attorneys blamed city paramedics for the 23-year-old Black man’s killing.
Lawyers for both sides gave opening statements in the trial of Aurora police officer Randy Roedema, 41, and former officer Jason Rosenblatt, 34, who each is charged with reckless manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide and assault in connection with McClain’s 2019 death.
They are the first to stand trial of the five people indicted in 2021 over McClain’s death, a case that drew outrage from across the country after the May 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and led to major protests in Colorado that summer.
Jury selection began Friday and ended Wednesday afternoon with a majority-white jury of 12 jurors and two alternates, evenly split with seven men and seven women.
McClain was walking home from a gas station in Aurora on Aug. 24, 2019 — wearing a black face mask as he often did — when a 17-year-old boy called 911 to report a suspicious person. Three responding officers detained McClain, violently forced him to the ground, used a carotid hold on him and handcuffed him before a paramedic injected McClain with the sedative ketamine.
McClain, who pleaded with officers again and again that he could not breathe, suffered cardiac arrest on the way to the hospital, where he was later declared brain dead. He died Aug. 30, 2019.
During opening statements, prosecutor Jonathan Bunge outlined a series of errors he says the officers made during the encounter with McClain: the officers didn’t have reasonable suspicion to detain McClain, who had committed no crime; the officers didn’t listen to McClain and needlessly escalated the encounter; they shut off or put down their body-worn cameras; they used excessive force and dangerous carotid holds; they ignored McClain’s pleas that he could not breathe and needed help, and they failed to tell paramedics the truth about his condition.
“A 23-year-old healthy young man, just walking down the street, became a casualty of the very people sworn to protect,” Bunge told jurors.
He noted that McClain said “I can’t breathe” seven times before he lost consciousness.
Defense attorneys Reid Elkus and Harvey Steinberg argued that the officers followed the training and policies of the Aurora Police Department and should not be held responsible for McClain’s death. They said Rosenblatt, Roedema and the third officer at the scene, Nathan Woodyard, who each outweighed McClain by at least 40 pounds, could not control McClain and used only necessary force to subdue him.
McClain, they said, was fine until Aurora paramedics Jeremy Cooper and Peter Cichuniec arrived and injected him with an overdose of the sedative ketamine.
“The death of Elijah McClain was a tragedy,” Elkus said. “But just because a tragedy occurred, does not mean criminology occurred.”
Prosecutors pushed back on that portrayal. They said McClain was vomiting within three minutes of being contacted by police — a common symptom known to follow carotid holds, in which a person’s carotid artery is squeezed shut to block blood flow to the brain and cause the person to lose consciousness.
The officers’ use of carotid holds on McClain violated the police department’s policy, Bunge said. He told jurors that officers were specifically trained on the dangers of the maneuver, and in particular the danger of doing it twice in a row on the same person. Rosenblatt performed a carotid hold on McClain, Bunge said, moments before Woodyard did a second carotid hold that caused McClain to lose consciousness.
Woodyard is scheduled to stand trial separately in October, while the trial for Cooper and Cichuniec is set to follow in November.
Steinberg said Rosenblatt attempted to perform a carotid hold but was unsuccessful. The hold lasted “literally seconds” before Rosenblatt let go, Steinberg said.
Bunge showed the jurors a picture of the mask McClain wore that night, smeared with red vomit. McClain’s autopsy showed that he had digestive fluid in his lungs because he was breathing in his own vomit, and that his lungs were twice as heavy as normal because of how much fluid he inhaled before he died, Bunge told jurors. He said McClain needed to cough, he needed to clear his lungs and get up from the ground, but he couldn’t because officers kept him handcuffed and restrained on the ground for about 15 minutes.
The prosecutor played video footage of McClain pleading for help and struggling to breathe, and of the officers telling paramedics that McClain was unusually strong and likely on drugs. McClain’s autopsy later showed he had only marijuana in his system.
“A sedative is the last thing he needs at that point in time, because it makes it even harder to breathe,” Bunge said.
McClain’s mother, Sheneen McClain, watched the opening statements from the front row. She dabbed her eyes at one point. Roedema and Rosenblatt, seated across the courtroom, largely stared down and forward without showing emotion during the opening statements. Roedema frequently shifted in his seat. At times he ran a finger under the collar of his suit and shirt.
Both of the officers’ defense attorneys focused heavily on Roedema’s claim — caught on body-worn camera footage — that McClain reached for Rosenblatt’s gun during the initial contact with officers. That threat justified the officers’ use of force, the attorneys argued.
But the body-worn camera footage doesn’t show McClain reaching for the gun and “there are reasons to be skeptical of that statement,” Bunge said, suggesting that Roedema lied in order to create a false narrative about the arrest and protect himself.
Elkus rejected that suggestion.
“Why would he make that up?” he said. “What motive does Mr. Roedema have to lie about that?”
McClain’s death eventually prompted changes to state law to limit the use of ketamine during police encounters and led to a consent decree over the Aurora Police Department. The city settled a lawsuit brought by McClain’s parents for $15 million.
Then-17th Judicial District Attorney Dave Young declined to press charges against the officers in McClain’s death and the county coroner at first found his cause of death to be “undetermined.”
However, after the case drew attention in 2020, Gov. Jared Polis appointed Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser as special prosecutor to re-examine the killing. That led a grand jury to bring indictments against both the police and paramedics involved. The Adams County Coroner’s Office also changed McClain’s cause of death from undetermined to complications from ketamine.
On Wednesday, Steinberg suggested the criminal case against the officers was baseless, a product of shifting politics that seek to blame police officers in all situations no matter what actions they take.
“Politics gets involved, and an amended report comes,” he said, noting that even that follow-up report did not say the officers’ actions contributed to McClain’s death. Young and former Aurora police Chief Nick Metz will testify during the trial that the officers acted in line with the police department’s training and policies, Elkus said.
“Basically, they were told to do this,” Elkus said. “That’s not criminal.”
The trial for Rosenblatt and Roedema will continue Thursday and is expected to last into mid-October.
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