Colorado attorney general Phil Weiser announced the charges of manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide just over two days after the two-year anniversary of McClain\u2019s death.<\/b>
\nA Colorado grand jury has handed down charges to three police officers and two paramedics in the death of Elijah McClain, a Black man who died after he was put in a chokehold and injected with a ketamine in a suburb of Denver in the summer of 2019. Colorado attorney general Phil Weiser announced the charges of manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide days after the two-year anniversary of McClain\u2019s death. He said several of the five would face additional charges. According to records, McClain,23, was stopped by Aurora police on the night of Aug.24 while walking home from a convenience store after a 911 caller had reported a man wearing a ski mask and waving his hands who seemed \u201csketchy.\u201d Body camera footage shows officers stopping McClain \u201cbecause [he was] being suspicious.\u201d The officers begin to restrain him as McClain repeatedly tries to explain himself. After the cameras stop recording video, but continue recording audio, McClain cries and says he can\u2019t breathe and was just on his way home. \u201cI\u2019m just different. I\u2019m just different, that\u2019s all. That\u2019s all I was doing. I\u2019m so sorry. I have no gun. I don\u2019t do that stuff. I don\u2019t do any fighting. Why were you attacking me? I don\u2019t do guns. I don\u2019t even kill flies. I don\u2019t eat meat…. I am a vegetarian,\u201d he pleads. Eventually the video returns and shows McClain vomiting while laying on his side as another officer leans on him. An officer who arrived later threatened to get his police dog to bite McClain. Paramedics then arrive and dose McClain with ketamine, a powerful sedative. While legal, the dosage was more than 1.5 times the amount for someone of McClain\u2019s weight. Within several minutes, McClain stopped breathing and he died six days later after he was declared brain dead and taken off life support. A lawsuit from the family alleges that McClain died as a result of a dramatic increase of lactic acid in his blood caused by excessive force used by police over about 18 minutes, combined with the effects of the ketamine. They claim that police continued to \u201ctorture\u201d McClain even after he was restrained, treatment they say is a result of the department\u2019s history of \u201cunconstitutional racist brutality.\u201d Several officers involved in the case have since been fired. Gov. Jared Polis ordered Weiser to open a new criminal investigation in 2020 after a district attorney had said in 2019 that he could not charge the officers because an autopsy could not determine how McClain died. The attorney general\u2019s office also is conducting a civil rights investigation into the Aurora Police Department, the first under a new police accountability law in Colorado, over a number of other incidents that may be racially motivated. With News Wire Services<\/p>\n