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Cichuniec, who’d served as a firefighter and paramedic for 18 years, was additionally convicted of second-degree assault for giving a drug with out consent or a reputable medical goal.
Throughout Friday’s sentencing listening to, Cichuniec gave a tearful assertion, saying he wished he might make modifications to “have a optimistic final result” for McClain.
“I can’t, and that destroys me as an individual, as a father and as a paramedic,” he stated.
Adams County District Choose Mark Warner acknowledged through the listening to the “many letters obtained by the courtroom that Mr. Cichuniec is a person of fine character.” However, he added, he additionally needed to think about the “dying of a younger man who is solely strolling dwelling from a comfort retailer.”
“It’s unattainable to unremember the video and pictures of Elijah McClain’s struggling within the final minutes of his younger life,” Warner stated through the sentencing.
McClain — a therapeutic massage therapist who performed violin at a neighborhood shelter to appease the animals — was strolling dwelling in August 2019. He was carrying headphones and a ski masks protecting his face when a driver known as 911 to report a “sketchy” particular person. Three Aurora cops arrived and went on to deal with McClain to the bottom, restraining him in a approach that brought on him to go out and in of consciousness.
When Cichuniec and the opposite responding paramedic, Cooper, arrived on the scene, they gave McClain ketamine. McClain later went into cardiac arrest whereas being transported to the hospital.
On Aug. 30, McClain was taken off life help and died.
McClain’s dying obtained renewed consideration in 2020, when George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police sparked a racial reckoning and intense scrutiny of circumstances by which unarmed Black folks had been killed, together with Breonna Taylor in Kentucky and Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia.
In June 2020, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) signed a sweeping police accountability law as a way to “create a brand new regular the place everyone’s rights are revered,” he stated at the time. A month later, Aurora’s interim police chief fired three officers who mocked McClain’s dying in a reenactment, The Washington Submit beforehand reported. Since McClain’s dying, Colorado has banned police chokeholds and limited the use of ketamine by paramedics throughout arrests.
The state legal professional normal’s workplace additionally launched a probe into McClain’s dying — leading to a 2021 report that discovered that Aurora police had a pattern of racially biased policing and use of excessive force. The investigation, The Submit reported, prompted town to enter a consent decree to nominate a third-party monitor to reform the practices of its police and fireplace departments.
That very same yr, a grand jury indicted the 2 paramedics and three Aurora cops who detained McClain.
Two of the officers had been acquitted of all prices. The third was sentenced in January to 14 months behind bars after being discovered responsible of criminally negligent murder and assault.
All through the paramedics’ trials, prosecutors accused Cichuniec and Cooper of failing to correctly monitor McClain and conduct fundamental medical checks. The paramedics recklessly administered an excessive amount of ketamine for McClain’s 140-pound physique, prosecutors stated.
The protection argued that neither of the paramedics knew that McClain had been positioned in a carotid maintain, a way that restricts blood stream to the mind. Realizing so, they stated, would have influenced their determination to inject the ketamine.
Though the paramedics’ attorneys claimed that the cops’ actions had been responsible for McClain’s dying, specialists testified that the ketamine shot was an excessive amount of for an already debilitated McClain. Prosecutors stated McClain advised police “I can’t breathe” a number of occasions as he was handcuffed on the bottom.
McClain’s mom, Sheneen McClain, advised the decide Friday that video confirmed first responders “smirking at my son’s turmoil.”
“Each firefighter that was there that night time felt no duty,” she stated. “They felt no have to cease the brutality that was taking place to my son as he pleaded for his life.”
Kim Bellware, Anumita Kaur and Andrea Salcedo contributed to this report.
