The sole Aurora police officer convicted in Elijah McClain’s death was sentenced to 14 months in jail Friday with the option for work-release, avoiding the prison time sought by prosecutors in the high-profile case.
District Judge Mark Warner sentenced former officer Randy Roedema at the conclusion of a two-hour hearing in Adams County District Court on Friday, more than four years after McClain, an unarmed 23-year-old Black man who committed no crime, was violently arrested by Aurora police and then injected with an overdose of a powerful sedative, leading to his death.
“This is not justice,” Sheneen McClain, Elijah’s mother, said afterward. “This is not about accountability. This is a slap on the wrist.”
The 41-year-old former police officer was convicted in October of criminally negligent homicide and third-degree assault in McClain’s 2019 death. Roedema faced between one and three years in prison on the homicide conviction and up to 24 months in jail on the assault conviction.
Warner sentenced Roedema to 14 months in jail on the assault conviction and 90 days in jail on the homicide conviction. The two sentences will be served at the same time, and Roedema will be eligible for work-release during his incarceration, the judge ruled.
He must report to the Adams County Jail by March 22, the judge said, and must also complete 200 hours of community service.
Roedema did not appear to visibly react when the sentence was imposed, though people on both sides of the case cried during the sentencing hearing. His attorneys said he plans to appeal his convictions.
Warner noted that Roedema would have been eligible for parole in about 13.5 months had he been sentenced to three years in prison, the maximum sentence allowable. Prosecutors asked for prison time “up to the maximum of three years.”
“The court was shocked by what appeared to be indifference to Elijah McClain’s suffering,” said Warner, who oversaw the three criminal trials in McClain’s death over the course of several months late last year.
Sheneen McClain addressed the judge before he handed down his sentence, and said Elijah McClain “was murdered with intent and malice.”
“My son, Elijah McClain, was a healthy young man the night Randy Roedema chose to show my son the power and privilege of the boys in blue,” she said.
Roedema also addressed the judge, saying the situation that night in 2019 had a “horrible outcome that no one intended or wanted to happen.”
He did not apologize for his actions, but said he hated that “the McClain family has to go through this,” and that he frequently thought about ways the encounter could have ended differently, had other people acted in a different way.
“I cannot imagine the agony they must feel,” Roedema said of McClain’s family. “…I have taken steps to grow and do better.”
After the sentencing, Roedema left the courthouse through a side door away from members of the media gathered outside the building’s front door. He was escorted by a deputy. His attorney, Reid Elkus, declined to comment to The Denver Post.
Seventy-six people submitted letters of support for Roedema before the sentencing, court records show, and four people spoke in support of him during the hearing. They described Roedema, a former Marine who was shot in Iraq in 2007, as a family-oriented, selfless man who dedicated his life to public service, first in the military, then as a Denver sheriff’s deputy and finally as an Aurora police officer.
His defense attorneys asked that he receive only probation, not incarceration. Elkus noted that Roedema would lose $4,300 in monthly disability payments should he be sentenced to more than 60 days in jail, and argued that Roedema would face an undue risk to his personal safety should he be incarcerated, because of his former job as a police officer and the nationwide attention directed at the case.
Roedema was the only one of three Aurora police officers charged in McClain’s death to be convicted. Two Aurora paramedics also were found guilty of criminally negligent homicide. Two other officers were acquitted.
McClain was walking home on Aug. 24, 2019, when officers contacted him after a teenager called 911 and reported McClain as a suspicious person. The 23-year-old was wearing a ski mask, listening to music and waving his arms as he walked home.
Within seconds of reaching McClain, Aurora police officers threw him to the ground and violently arrested him. Roedema helped to restrain McClain and Aurora police officer Nathan Woodyard used a carotid hold on McClain, squeezing his neck to force him to lose consciousness.
McClain vomited after the neck hold and inhaled that vomit into his lungs, testimony at trial revealed. He begged the officers for help, repeatedly telling them that he could not breathe, but the officers did not give him any medical aid, instead calling for paramedics.
After McClain was subdued and handcuffed, Aurora paramedics Jeremy Cooper and Peter Cichuniec injected McClain with an overdose of the sedative ketamine, and he suffered a heart attack. He never recovered and died in the hospital days later.
Roedema, Cichuniec and Cooper were convicted. Woodyard and former officer Jason Rosenblatt were acquitted.
The two former Aurora Fire Rescue paramedics are scheduled to be sentenced March 1.
Sign up to get crime news sent straight to your inbox each day.