The mother of Elijah McClain spoke out about the sentencing of one of the Colorado paramedics who was tried and convicted in her 23-year-old son’s death.
A judge sentenced Peter Cichuniec to five years in prison, which is the minimum sentence for his criminally negligent homicide conviction.
“Minimum, the bare minimum always?” Elijah’s mother, Sheneen McClain, questioned to reporters after the sentencing. “No. We deserve better, we deserve more because we are worth more.”
Cichuniec and fellow paramedic Jeremy Cooper were both found guilty of criminally negligent homicide last December for injecting McClain with a lethal dose of ketamine in 2019. Cichuniec was also found guilty of second-degree assault for administering drugs without consent.
McClain was stopped by police officers on August 24, 2019, in an Aurora suburb as he was walking home after police received a report about a suspicious-looking person. During that encounter, police forced him to the ground and handcuffed him. One officer put McClain in a chokehold that restricted oxygen flow to his brain and caused him to lose consciousness briefly.
“I’m not OK. I never will be,” Sheneen McClain told KUSA in an interview. “Everybody there that night, even the ones that did not get convicted for my son’s murder, even the ones that walked away, even the ones that stood there and watched, they’re all guilty and they’re all scum.”
Before McClain’s transport to the hospital, officers held an unconscious McClain down as Cooper gave him a 500-milligram dose of ketamine, a sedative. Cichuniec, the senior paramedic on the scene, told authorities it was his decision to administer the drug. They never asked or consulted McClain about the dose and he went into cardiac arrest and stopped breathing just a few minutes after receiving it. He died six days later.
“No matter who they want to call faulty when it’s their own actions that killed my son. They had an…
Read the full article here
