Family members of Elijah McClain, the 23-year-old Black man who died last summer after police in Aurora, Colorado, restrained him with a chokehold and paramedics injected him with ketamine, filed a lawsuit against the city Tuesday.
“We have filed this civil rights lawsuit to demand justice for Elijah McClain, to hold accountable the Aurora officials, police officers and paramedics responsible for his murder, and to force the city of Aurora to change its long-standing pattern of brutal and racist policing,” Mari Newman, a lawyer for the family, said in a statement.
The civil complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court by McClain’s parents, Sheneen McClain and Lawayne Mosley, seeks damages for the family and names the city, 12 police officers, two Fire Department paramedics and their medical director as plaintiffs.
“In a span of 18 minutes, defendants subjected Elijah to a procession of needless and brutal force techniques and unnecessary, recklessly administered medication, the combined effects of which he could not survive,” the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit also said the city “permits and encourages a culture of racial violence in its Police Department” and accused police of using unnecessary force in response to demonstrators who gathered to protest McClain’s death.
Representatives of the police and the fire departments did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday afternoon. A spokeswoman for Aurora said “the city is currently reviewing the lawsuit and is unable to comment at this time.”
Elijah McClain, a massage therapist, was walking home from a convenience store with some iced tea Aug. 24 when someone called 911, saying he “looked sketchy” and was wearing a ski mask and waving his arms.
Police arrived and moved to handcuff him, even though McClain had not committed any crime. After struggling to restrain McClain, the officers used a carotid hold, which restricts blood to the brain to render someone unconscious.
The lawsuit includes a transcript of McClain’s final words, beginning with: “I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe please. I can’t. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe, please stop.”
Body camera footage shows McClain pleading while trying to get out of the officers’ grip. The officers eventually brought him to the ground, claiming he had reached for one of their guns while they were pinning him against a wall to handcuff him. The body camera footage does not show this, officers said, because their cameras had fallen onto the grass.
After paramedics arrived, they injected McClain with ketamine, a powerful sedative. Body camera footage shows that the injection made his body go limp when he was loaded onto a gurney. On the way to a hospital, McClain went into cardiac arrest. He died a few days later.
An autopsy report, released in November, said a combination of factors could have killed McClain. A few days later, Dave Young, the Adams County district attorney, announced that criminal charges would not be filed, saying there was not enough evidence that the officers had broken the law when they used force on McClain.
The decision angered McClain’s family, and this spring, his mother pushed lawmakers to adopt police reforms.
“We’re coming up on the one-year anniversary of Elijah’s murder, and it’s long past time to hold his killers accountable,” Newman, the lawyer, said. “We were hopeful that the city of Aurora would stand up and do what’s right and not drag this family through the incredibly difficult and heart-wrenching process of litigation. It didn’t.”
McClain’s case received renewed attention after the killing of George Floyd, a Black man who died in Minneapolis on May 25 after being pinned to the ground by an officer who pressed his knee onto Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes, spurring nationwide protests against systemic racism and police brutality.
In June, the Aurora Police Department announced a ban on carotid holds like the one used on McClain. Officers are also now required to report excessive force used by their colleagues and to announce their intention to use deadly force before firing their weapon.
Three police officers were placed on administrative leave after McClain’s death but were later reinstated. Last month, one of them was fired for having texted “haha” in response to a photograph of three other officers mocking McClain near a memorial that had been set up in his memory.
In June, Gov. Jared Polis appointed a special prosecutor to investigate whether the case warranted criminal prosecution. The City Council of Aurora last month voted for an independent investigation into the death.
In an unrelated case last week, the Aurora police chief apologized after officers handcuffed members of a Black family, including two children lying on the ground, in a mistaken stolen-car stop that was captured on a video that has been widely shared. That car stop is now under investigation.
McClain was declared brain-dead Aug. 27 and taken off life support three days later. “Aurora’s brutality denied Elijah almost his entire adult life, a life of bright promise both for him and for the many people with whom he would have shared his light and compassion,” the lawsuit said.