A former Colorado police officer was sentenced to 14 months in prison for his role in the 2019 murder 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 third-degree assault.
He also ordered four years of probation and 90 days in prison, to be served concurrently with the assault sentence for criminally negligent homicide.
Roedema was not immediately detained. He has until March 22 to turn himself in at the Adams County Jail.
“The court was shocked by what appeared to be truly indifference to Elijah McClain’s suffering,” Warner said before handing down the sentence.
Roedema wipes a tear from her eye during the sentencing hearing Friday at the Adams County Courthouse in Brighton, Colorado. AP
Sheneen McClain, the 23-year-old’s mother, addressed the judge before the sentence was announced and said she looked for any signs of remorse as she attended the trials of those who killed her son.
“I haven’t found any,” he said. “I have listened to the trials to see if I could hear it in their voices, but instead I only heard lies and blaming others for their trained cruelty.”
Roedema expressed his condolences to the McClain family in court Friday. He did not apologize for Elijah McClain’s death and said he took the actions he took because he was following his training.
“I can’t help but contemplate all the different scenarios that could have taken place that night that could have resulted in a different outcome,” Roedema told the court. “For example, I wish a passerby hadn’t made that (911) call.”
Elijah McClain was killed after paramedics injected the 23-year-old with ketamine they were using as a sedative in 2019. via REUTERS
Prosecutor Jason Slothouber told the judge that Roedema’s statement showed “no acknowledgment of his intent to harm Mr. McClain through pain, no acknowledgment of his serious deviations from his training; In fact, quite the opposite”.
There were three trials in total related to McClain’s death.
In a second trial, Aurora police officer Nathan Woodyard, 34, was found not guilty of involuntary manslaughter in November.
In the third trial, paramedics Jeremy Cooper, 49, and Peter Cichuniec, 51, were found guilty of criminally negligent homicide at a trial last month. They will be sentenced on March 1.
Elijah McClain lies in a hospital bed in Aurora Colorado in August 2019. via REUTERS
BRUTAL CONFRONTATION
Police confronted McClain while he was walking home from a convenience store after a passerby called 911 to report that a man wearing a winter coat and balaclava on a warm night was acting suspiciously.
The police put their hands on the young man seconds after arresting him and strangled him in the carotid at least twice. He vomited into his balaclava and repeatedly told officers he couldn’t breathe.
During Roedema and Rosenblatt’s trial, defense attorneys played body camera audio in which Roedema can be heard yelling that McClain tried to grab Rosenblatt’s gun. After that, police actions escalated dramatically.
Prosecutors noted there was no video showing any attempt to grab a gun and suggested during the trial that Roedema was lying or had made a mistake.
The original autopsy performed in 2019 found the cause of death to be “undetermined.” An autopsy report reviewed in 2021 concluded that McClain died from “complications from ketamine administration following forcible restraint.”
During Roedema and Rosenblatt’s trial, defense attorneys played body camera audio in which Roedema can be heard yelling that McClain tried to grab Rosenblatt’s gun. AP
Local prosecutors initially declined to press charges. That changed following the May 2020 killing of George Floyd, a Black man who died at the hands of Minneapolis police.
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis asked the state attorney general’s office in June 2020 to investigate McClain’s case. A state grand jury indicted the officers and paramedics in 2021.
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Source: vtt.edu.vn