(BRIGHTON, Colo.) — A former paramedic who injected Elijah McClain with ketamine avoided prison and was sentenced to probation Friday after his homicide conviction in the Black man’s death, which helped fuel the 2020 racial injustice protests.
Jeremy Cooper faced up to three years in prison. He administered a dose of the sedative ketamine to McClain, 23, who had been forcibly restrained after police stopped him as he was walking home in a Denver suburb in 2019.
The sentencing caps a series of trials that stretched over seven months and resulted in the convictions of a police officer and two paramedics. Criminal charges against paramedics and emergency medical technicians involved in police custody cases are rare.
Experts say the convictions would have been unheard of before 2020, when George Floyd’s murder sparked a nationwide reckoning over racist policing and deaths in police custody.
McClain’s mother, Sheneen McClain, says the two acquitted officers — as well as other firefighters and police who were there — were complicit in her son’s killing and escaped justice.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below.
DENVER (AP) — Almost five years after Elijah McClain died following a police stop in which he was put in a neck hold and injected with the powerful sedative ketamine, three of the five Denver-area officers and paramedics prosecuted in the Black man’s death have been convicted.
Experts say the convictions would have been unheard of before 2020, when George Floyd’s murder sparked a nationwide reckoning over racist policing and deaths in police custody. At a sentencing hearing Friday, Jeremy Cooper, a former Aurora Fire Rescue paramedic, faces up to three years in prison after he was convicted in December of criminally negligent homicide in McClain’s 2019 death.
But McClain’s mother, Sheneen McClain, said justice has not yet been served. She said the two acquitted Aurora police officers, as well as other…
