Elijah McClain did not accidentally end up being choked by police and then overdosed with ketamine, killing him.
Jurors in the trials against the Aurora officers who were responsible for Elijah’s death didn’t get that.
Aurora police officer bodycam footage, and even testimony from the cops themselves, made it unequivocal he should never even have been harassed on a hot August night in 2019, let alone killed.
Elijah was walking home from a convenience store with cans of iced tea, listening to music through earbuds, dancing along.
Elijah was Black, which proved to be lethal for him.
It’s likely that if Elijah had been white, he’d be alive. A white guy, dancing along, probably wouldn’t have caught the attention of a passing motorist, who called Aurora police dispatch to say a sketchy Black guy was walking along, not doing anything criminal, just being Black and sketchy.
Being Black, and especially a Black male, has been so much of a liability in Aurora, and plenty of other cities, that the state’s attorney general forced Aurora police to submit to a vast array of police reforms because of “patterns and practices” of abusing Black people and using excessive force on them.
For more than a decade, the Sentinel has exposed all kinds of the repugnant acts by a clear minority of Aurora officers bringing a dark cloud of shame upon the entire department.
Former Aurora Police officer Nathan Woodyard, acquitted this week by a jury in Brighton, was among the bad cops in the department.
Within seconds of pulling up on Elijah, he was out of his squad car and physically confronting him, clearly petrifying the 23-year-old massage therapist.
In the shadow of decades of unchecked abuse, Black people in Aurora, and across the nation, have good reason to be petrified when confronted by a cop.
Within minutes, Elijah was essentially ambushed by police. Alarmed and smelling his own death, he panicked, not differently than had been confronted by any other local gang of thugs.
Witnesses in Woodyward’s trial, and that of two other Aurora cops responsible for Elijah’s death, testified that the cops failed to follow accepted — and wise — police procedures and training, nearly from the beginning of their confrontation.
Where common sense and good policing dictates that officers de-escalate an encounter, that never happened. Instead, Elijah, like so many Black men, are confronted with the “don’t make me hit you again” attitude that bullies have capitalized on for eons in bad marriages and bad police departments.
They tackled him. Throttled him. They forced him to choke and aspirate his own vomit while he begged for air.
It was a cruel, sadistic attack that anyone without a gun and a badge would be jailed for, and rightfully so.
But these officers’ defense lawyers pointed out that, despite nearly killing Elijah in the minutes they confronted and attacked him, it was, ultimately, an overdose of ketamine wrongly injected into him that technically caused his heart to stop, eventually ending his life.
There’s little doubt that, on the surface, that’s probably true. What technically ended Elijah’s life was probably a ghastly case of medical malpractice.
But the wrongful, racist confrontation and assault by three Aurora police officers certainly led to his death.
Did that cause his death? Absolutely.
Elijah would be alive today if he hadn’t been attacked by the police and then targeted with a falsified need for a ketamine injection based on the quackery of an “excited delirium” call.
Two of the three cops who helped kill Elijah got off from being held accountable because jurors, like many people, think Elijah caused his own death by not immediately succumbing to the cops’ demands.
No doubt that had Elijah been an older white woman or even a fellow white cop, the deadly abuse inflicted on Elijah would, to the jury, have clearly been seen as deadly abuse.
That’s the problem. There are now state laws that prevent future Black victims of excessive force from being injected with ketamine. A new law forbids cops from choking people into unconsciousness for carrying home iced tea and panicking when cops confront them inexplicably in the dark.
But there is no effective law for cops, or anyone, to prevent seeing a Black man as a threat because he is Black.
Police reaction to Elijah being Black is what caused his death. Assault, choking, asphyxiation and an eventual ketamine overdose were just the details of his homicide.
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