Paramedic sentenced to five years in prison for Elijah McClain’s death
A paramedic convicted of fatally dosing Elijah McClain with the controlled sedative ketamine will spend five years in prison, according to a sentence doled out in court on Friday (March 1). Peter Cichuniec was found guilty of criminally negligent homicide and second degree assault during his trial in December.
The young Elijah was walking home with a plastic bag and iced tea when he was approached by police responding to reports of a suspicious person wearing a ski mask. The harrowing interactions, which were captured by the officers’ body cameras, showed that the Black man was wrestled and placed in a chokehold, causing him to lose consciousness.
When paramedics arrived at the scene, Elijah was administered two doses of the powerful sedative. Cichuniec admitted to administering the second dose of 500 mg, which was determined to be enough to sedate a 200-pound person. Elijah weighed 143 pounds. While en route to a hospital, he suffered a heart attack and died three days later.
“It is impossible to unremember the video and images of Elijah McClain’s suffering in the last minutes of his young life,” said Adams County Judge Mark Warner. After learning his fate, Cichuniec said that he wished he could tell the man’s mother that her son was going to be okay. Sheneen McClain, Elijah’s mother, read her emotionally charged statement, saying in part, “Reality is that they could have done something simply by just saying stop hurting my patient; instead, they chose to make the situation worse for my son and implicating themselves in my son’s murder by attempting to cover up the brutality of my son’s murder with a chemical sedative.”
After court, through tears, she spoke with 9News about the sentencing. “I don’t know what’s worse, having to wait this long, having to see justice continue, having people get paid for my pain. I don’t know, I don’t know what’s worse, but I’m not okay. I never will be,” she said.
The grieving mother continued, “They had an opportunity to save him. He was speaking; he was talking when they got there. It doesn't make any sense for them to be so disrespectful to my son’s life and to lie on the stand and think it’s nothing… They didn’t intervene. They didn’t call foul. They did nothing to stop the brutality of my son, and then, even worse, they injected him with something that would completely kill him. If Elijah had survived, he would not remember what happened to him because of ketamine. They attempted to do exactly what they did; they are accomplices to my son’s murder.”
She would go on to criticize the system, saying that “nothing stops their hatred, nothing stops the racism, and nothing stops their evil protocols and practices. We mean nothing to them.” Co-defendant Jeremy Cooper was also convicted of criminally negligent homicide in December and will be sentenced in April.
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