The family of Elijah McClain is going after the city of Aurora and 13 of its police officers, claiming they’re all to blame for his 2019 death.
McClain’s parents just filed the lawsuit in Colorado claiming the city, the cops, a paramedic, and a doctor should be held responsible for the August 24, 2019 fatal incident based on their “needless use of excessive force and torture.”
According to new legal docs, obtained by 360aproko, the family says Elijah was listening to music on a short walk home from the corner store “when Aurora police officers grabbed, tackled, and assaulted him.”
In the lawsuit, they claim officers “continued to brutalize Elijah for nearly eighteen minutes—approximately fifteen minutes of which he was handcuffed.” They also allege the force the officers used against Elijah included “compressing his neck and the blood flow to his brain with two consecutive carotid holds, cranking his left shoulder with an armbar hammerlock that caused it to repeatedly pop.”
Describing the arrest even further … the family claims Elijah vomited after they slammed him to the ground. According to the docs, another officer allegedly “jammed his knee into Elijah’s arm for minutes on end” with the sole purpose of inflicting pain and eventually separating Elijah’s biceps and triceps muscles.
Then the paramedics arrived, but the family claims things only got worse. In the suit, they claim an EMT “involuntarily injected him with a massive dose of ketamine” even though he was not experiencing any medical condition that would have required ketamine … a powerful sedative.
Minutes after they injected him with the sedative, Elijah stopped breathing, had no pulse and never regained consciousness before dying a few days later.
As we reported … Aurora PD officers stopped Elijah while responding to a call about a suspicious person walking the streets wearing a ski mask and waving his arms. His family had previously said he commonly wore the mask to keep warm.
Body-camera footage of the incident shows Elijah telling the cops, “Let go of me. I am an introvert. Please respect the boundaries that I am speaking.” His final words — documented at the beginning of the lawsuit from start to finish — popped up on social media posts demanding justice.
Gov. Jared Polis had said back in June the case would be reopened with a special prosecutor appointed to the case. Three cops were fired last month and one other resigned after a photo surfaced mocking Elijah’s death. Three of those four cops are named in the lawsuit.
