Killing of Elijah McClain
death of an African-American citizen of the United States associated with law enforcement
Elijah Jovan McClain (February 25, 1996 – August 30, 2019) was a 23-year-old black American man from Aurora, Colorado, who was killed as a result of being illegally injected with 500 mg of ketamine by paramedics after being forcibly detained by police officers. He went into cardiac arrest and died six days later in the hospital. He had been walking home from a convenience store. Three police officers and two paramedics were charged with his death. Both paramedics and one of the officers were convicted of negligent homicide. The paramedics conviction was overturned and is pending a new trial. The other two officers were acquitted of all charges.
On August 24, 2019, three Aurora Police officers confronted McClain after responding to a call by an Aurora civilian about an unarmed person wearing a ski mask that looked "sketchy". The three police officers who were involved in the incident (Nathan Woodyard, Jason Rosenblatt, and Randy Roedema) all said that their body cameras were knocked off during a struggle with McClain. McClain was forcibly held to the ground with his hands cuffed behind his back, after which Woodyard twice applied a choke hold.
“Killing of Elijah McClain” enters the record as death of an African-American citizen of the United States associated with law enforcement. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Killing, Elijah and McClain can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q96376098. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1996 and 2019.
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This entry incorporates text from “Killing of Elijah McClain” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.