Sundiata Post – A white police officer in the United States, Randy Roedema, has been sentenced to 14 months imprisonment over the death of a young Black man, Elijah McClain.
The Black man died after he was put in a police chokehold and injected with ketamine in 2019.
The death of McClain in the western United States occurred months before the high-profile killing of George Floyd, but drew renewed attention soon after as protests against police brutality swelled.
A special investigation was launched in 2020, and Randy Roedema was convicted of manslaughter in October, while two other police officers were acquitted.
Sentencing Roedema in a Colorado court Friday, January 5, 2024, Judge Mark Werner said he was “shocked by what appeared to be, really, indifference to Elijah McClain’s suffering”.
McClain “was handcuffed and really wasn’t much of a threat to anybody,” Werner said.
McClain, 23, died in Aurora, near Denver, three days after he was put in a chokehold by police, injected with ketamine to sedate him and suffered cardiac arrest.
Police had responded to a call about a “suspicious” black male “acting weird” in the street and wearing a ski mask, the district attorney’s report said.
One officer said McClain, who was unarmed, had reached for another officer’s gun.
McClain’s family said he had been out buying iced tea, and often wore the mask to stay warm because he suffered from anemia.
“Randy Roedema will always be a bully with a badge,” Elijah’s mother, Sheneen McClain, said on Friday ahead of the sentencing.
“Prison is the only accountable justice that Randy Roedema deserves”, she told AFP while denouncing the Colorado police’s “inhuman protocols”.
Roedema, on Friday, told the judge he and fellow officers had “responded in the way we were trained to do”.
Last month, a Colorado jury separately found two paramedics guilty of criminally negligent homicide over the incident.
They are awaiting sentencing.
