Up First from NPR - The Sunday Story: The Life And Death Of Elijah McClain

Episode Date: October 1, 2023

In Colorado, the first of two trials is underway in the death of Elijah McClain.On a late summer night in 2019, McClain, a 23-year-old Black man, was stopped by police in Aurora, Colorado as he was walking home. McClain was put in a chokehold and injected with a high dose of ketamine. He died several days later in the hospital.Authorities declined to press charges against police and paramedics involved in the incident, insisting "they had acted consistently with their training." But nearly a year after McCain's death, the case was reopened. Now three police officers and two paramedics face criminal charges including assault, manslaughter and homicide.Colorado Public Radio justice reporter Allison Sherry has followed McClain's case and the way his legacy has made an impact on policing in Colorado. Today on The Sunday Story, we bring you an excerpt of the audio documentary, "The Life and Death of Elijah Mclain."This story includes graphic descriptions of violence and sounds from body cameras worn by police officers.The full version of this audio documentary is in the podcast Colorado in Depth. To stay updated on the trials, go to cpr.org.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

I'm Ayesha Roscoe, and this is The Sunday Story. On the night of August 24th, 2019, a 23-year-old black man, Elijah McClain, was walking home from a convenience store in Aurora, Colorado, a suburb of Denver. A passerby called 911, saying he looked sketchy. Police officers quickly arrived on the scene. What we know is that there was a struggle. The police put Elijah into a carotid chokehold. When paramedics arrived, they injected Elijah with a high dose of ketamine to subdue him.

Elijah lost his pulse. On the way to the hospital, he had a cardiac arrest. Elijah died several days later. Some of this confrontation was documented in body cam footage released months after Elijah's death. Aurora's police chief emphasized that what happened that night was a necessary use of force. But during the protests in 2020, after the death of George Floyd, Elijah's case received renewed attention. One big reason for this is that Elijah's mother,

Shanine McClain, had been tirelessly demanding justice for her son. They didn't try to save his life. They did everything they could to harm him, to hurt him, to brutalize him, to terrorize him, and then to cover it up. Now more than four years after Elijah's death, three police officers and two paramedics involved are facing criminal charges, 32 counts in total. The first trial for two of the officers is now underway. The jurors have returned to the courtroom and are seated. Please be seated. The charges include reckless manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide, and assault. All five have pleaded not guilty. Among those in the courtroom is Colorado Public Radio's justice reporter Allison Sherry. She has followed the case for the last three years and she hosts a

new audio documentary unpacking the timeline that led to this trial and the ways Elijah's legacy has made an impact on policing in Colorado. Today on the Sunday Story, we'll play an excerpt of the documentary, The Life and Death of Elijah McClain. A warning, this story includes graphic descriptions of violence and sounds from body cameras worn by police officers. Here's Allison Sherry. Elijah McClain was a son, a brother, a healer, and a musician. Now his ashes are up on a shelf in his mom Shanine's house, surrounded by his pictures. Elijah, he comes by still.

You know, he's just in a different form. He's a spirit instead of a human. You feel him still? Oh, totally. I totally feel him. You talk to him? I sure do. Yeah.

I talk to him, you know. Sometimes while I'm asleep, the TV will turn on and it lets me know that he's stopping by. He's stopping by to see how we are. Elijah was like that, always thinking about how other people might be feeling. His mom, Shanine, has been fighting for justice in his death for four years, and she's had to lean on his spirit to be able to do it. Shanine McClain raised Elijah without his dad being around much. He was the second oldest of her six kids.

They grew up without a lot of money. Shanine had a series of different jobs, including driving for Lyft. They moved around a lot and sometimes stayed in motels. He was known for his kindness and extreme empathy. Also, he was curious. You may know that he played the violin. He taught himself how to play, and the guitar too. He kept discovering new things. But as Shanine describes it, school wasn't really working for him. It wasn't teaching him enough. He decided to drop out. So after Elijah dropped out at the age of 17, he started reading more. He became more interested

in learning. He got a job at Little Caesars Pizza, and he was working there. And when he turned 18, he got his GED. As soon as he got his GED, he enrolled into the Denver School of Massage Therapy. And instead of him finishing in 12 months, he finished in seven. He decided on massage therapy because he was good with his hands. And he had been, when he was a child, we were going to church and our bishop had actually prophesied about his hands, and she said he had healing hands. She said, look at his hands. They look like he played the piano.

And I was like, okay, that's true. He had so many people that were repeat customers as massage therapists. He wanted to give back to people, teach them how to help them heal themselves. It wasn't just people that Elijah cared about. He took his musical instruments to animal shelters and played his violin to cats and dogs on his lunch hours because he thought they were lonely. It was of Elijah's death, the twists and turns that brought us here to this moment. It has been four long years for his family, who've sought justice since police approached Elijah when he was on a peaceful walk home late at night on August 24th, 2019. You've probably read about this case or heard it on the news. You may have even seen body cam footage from that

night. After the police forcibly stopped him, first responders took Elijah to the hospital. But for those closest to Elijah, for his mom Shanine, details about what happened were not immediately available. They came out slowly and excruciatingly. So I'm going to start with Shanine. On the morning of August 25th, 2019, Shanine was contacted by police. She was living at a hotel at the time. She'd been evicted recently because she didn't have enough money to pay the rent. I was at the hotel with my other children. I was there with my youngest daughter and my youngest son.

And the police were adamant about coming to where I was. They wouldn't give me any information about what had happened to Elijah, and I thought that was real. I thought that was real discouraging. That meant that there was something secretive going on. So they came to the hotel that I was at, and they put me in one police vehicle, and they put my two children in another police vehicle, and there was a police liaison, or the victim's advocate was there also. And when we got to the hospital, it still took another hour or so for them to let me see Elijah. And their explanation was that they needed to have a conference so that they can get everybody together and talk about what had happened to them. Did they tell you anything?

They wouldn't tell me anything. They just, they were, they were, mom's the word. You know, there was nothing that they would literally disclose to me that prepared me for what I saw when I went into Elijah's hospital room. And when we went into his hospital room, he was hooked up to all kinds of machines. His eyes was closed and he wasn't breathing on his room, he was hooked up to all kinds of machines. His eyes was closed, and he wasn't breathing on his own. He was hooked up. They had his body wrapped in bubble wrap. They had his middle torso wrapped in bubble wrap,

and I found out later that that was when they knew they were about to donate organs. Donating organs was something Elijah had elected on his driver's license. Shanine sat there for days. The police presence was big the whole time, but they didn't tell her much about what happened. There was a nurse that was really nice. He was really nice and informative. He let me know that Elijah had been injected with academy.

And that's when I started doing research about it and found out that it was a horse tranquilizer and that it could be used as a daybreak drug and all kind of other things under the scope of ketamine. And, you know, I kept thinking, I was like, why would they give my son ketamine? The police asked Shanine some confusing things in the hospital. The whole time that they were asking me questions, they kept insinuating that it was all Elijah's fault. some confusing things in the hospital. The whole time that they were asking me questions,

they kept insinuating that it was all Elijah's fault. They asked me, was he, had he ever done drugs? I said, no, he wasn't that kind of person. He was a massage therapist. He kept his body clean. He was a vegetarian. I think it was like maybe two or three months later, once we saw the video, it confirmed all of my fears that they had jumped my

son. You're listening to The Sunday Story. We'll be right back. Now Our Change will honor 100 years of the Royal Canadian Air Force and their dedicated service to communities at home and abroad. From the skies to Our Change, this $2 commemorative circulation coin marks their storied past and promising future. Find the limited edition Royal Canadian Air Force $2 coin today. We're back with the Sunday story with Colorado Public Radio justice reporter Allison Sherry. On August 27th, three days after the police stopped him on the street, Elijah McClain died. In the weeks after, Shanine held vigils for her son in a field across the street from where the police had stopped him. It was dusty and loud, with traffic roaring by along a highway above.

She went to a dollar tree and bought solar lights and plastic flowers. She had Elijah's body cremated. The Aurora police put out a statement about the encounter with Elijah McClain two days after it happened, while he was still in the hospital. As they'd done with Shanine, the police's statement puts a lot of emphasis on Elijah's actions. He resisted contact. He acted agitated. The police statement doesn't attribute any specific action to the officers. It's all stated passively.

A struggle ensued, it says. Elijah was taken into custody. Police Chief Nick Metz kept telling the public that the force officers used on McClain and the administration of ketamine was necessary. He made it sound like Elijah McClain was a big guy who was acting violently and needed to be sedated. But Elijah was a small guy, only 140 pounds, and his friends and family knew him as a gentle person. Still, the city government deferred to chief metts, and the story didn't really get questioned, except by Elijah's family. But if someone dies in custody,

that sparks an outside investigation. A group of investigators started reviewing what happened. The police used that as the reason not to immediately release the body camera footage. So for months, the public had no video to look at, even though the police acknowledged right away that the footage existed. It made it hard for anyone to get answers for Elijah's death. Some people tried. A group of community activists held small protests. The Aurora newspaper reported they also showed up to city council meetings, trying to get more information. About two and a half months after he died, the coroner released the autopsy. It noted he weighed 140 pounds, about 60 pounds less than the paramedics on scene who administered the ketamine had estimated. The autopsy also noted that Elijah had a scant mustache and a few hairs on his chin. It noted he had pierced ears and good teeth. He had chronic asthma.

As to what killed him, the pathologist notes that Elijah violently struggled with the police officers. And that officers put him in a chokehold. In the last paragraph, he runs through several options for the cause of death. The pathologist writes that the manner of death may have been an accident. He goes on, it may have been, quote, natural because of Elijah's intense physical exertion in the struggle with the officers, combined with an unusually narrow artery sending blood to his heart. The pathologist says it may be a homicide if the actions of the officers led to his death. But, he concludes, based on his review, he cannot determine which manner of death is most likely.

This finding was devastating for Elijah's mom. Because the coroner's not putting any blame on anyone for Elijah's death, the lack of homicide finding in this original autopsy was a key factor in whether anyone would face criminal responsibility. First of all, thank you for being here this evening. I'm Nick Metz, chief of police with the Aurora Police Department. A couple of weeks after the autopsy was released, Aurora Police invited reporters to a press conference on a Friday night, just before Thanksgiving. Chief Metz stood at a podium. It had now been three months since Elijah died.

I think it's really important to first say that on behalf of the women and the men of the Aurora Police Department, that we first want to extend our sincerest condolences to Elijah McClain's family. He shared the body camera footage so everybody can finally see it. What it shows reveals how deeply the police's story about what happened that night was incomplete and misleading. The footage shows the final moments when Elijah was free and misleading. The footage shows the final moments when Elijah was free and alive. He was peacefully walking home, minding his own business on a sidewalk

in front of an apartment building, headphones on, slinging a white plastic bag with iced tea in it. Hey, stop right there. Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop.

I have a right to stop you because you're being suspicious. Turn around. Turn around. Turn around. Then the officers put their hands on him almost immediately, within the first nine seconds of reaching him. No, I am an introvert. Please respect the boundaries that I am speaking. Stop tensing up. Stop. Relax. I'm going home. Relax or I'm going to have to change. I started to rest and I was stopping my music to listen. Now let go of me.

Let's get over to the grass. The footage is traumatic to listen to and to see, so I'm not going to play any more of it here, but I'll describe some of what's going on. You can hear an officer accuse Elijah of reaching for one of their guns, though even at the time the other officers weren't sure which gun he was supposedly reaching for. They restrain his arms and push him against a wall. They crank his shoulder back until it pops several times.

They put him in a carotid chokehold and he briefly passes out. He throws up a few times into the mask, but his arms are in handcuffs, so he can't take it off. He repeatedly cries. He tells the officers he can't breathe. He pleads with them that he's just going home. My name is Elijah McClain, he says, and I'm just going home. He is sobbing. Officers keep telling him to relax, to chill. He continues to cry. I'm an introvert, and I'm just different, he says. I have no gun, he cries. I don't do that stuff. I don't do any fighting. The officers talk to each other about Elijah's super strength and the holds they're going to

use to restrain him. They also declare their intention to give him ketamine before the medical professionals, the paramedics, even arrive. While he's on the ground with an officer leaning on him and several more gathered around, the paramedics administer the extra large dose of ketamine into his shoulder. At one point on the body camera, you can hear an officer threaten to bring out a dog. That's the one part of this whole thing that the Aurora police readily apologized for pretty soon after it became public. A lot of the confrontation is hard to make out in the video. But what you can see clearly is the moment paramedics tell the officers on the scene that Elijah lost his pulse in the ambulance.

The officers looked shocked. At the press conference, right after they show the video, Chief Metz announces that the district attorney has decided not to charge the officers involved in Elijah's death. The district attorney, Dave Young, doesn't speak that night. He only submitted a written letter. It says there's not enough evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that anyone committed a crime that led to Elijah's death. It says specifically that since the autopsy doesn't determine a cause of death, he'd have trouble convincing the jury it was a homicide. Case closed. The three officers that were involved were placed on administrative leave, and that is our policy. Each officer then goes through a reintegration program.

They are designed, this is designed to promote healthy return to duty. All the officers, involved officers, have since returned to duty. The officers had been paid during this leave. Within three months of Elijah's death, they had returned to duty. Chief Metz took questions from reporters. How do you feel the officers handled this? Was this, do you think this was the best handling of the situation as the chief? I think, I think there were, I think overall the officers did a good job. I think the officers overall, you know, you heard the conversations with them. I think overall,

the officers were trying to calm Elijah down. I think in every single situation... He tells the reporters that he's asked high-ranking people in the police department to review how the officers acted, to see if they think the officers did anything wrong. A few months later, in early 2020, that review board put out its findings. It said the officers acted consistently with their training. They did the right thing, the board said. By this time, before any real scrutiny had come down on the police department, Chief Nick Metz had retired. He told the Denver Post he'd been, quote, fortunate to run his agency without a lot of interference. The newspaper said Metz retired on his own terms.

So how did we go from there to now, where officers and paramedics are facing criminal charges that they killed Elijah McClain? And the culture of the Aurora Police Department itself is also on trial. You're listening to The Sunday Story. I'm Ayesha Roscoe. Stay with us. In the spring of 2020, outrage about all the Black men and women who'd been killed and brutalized by police around the country boiled over. The public demanded news coverage and accountability for these actions in the wake of George Floyd's murder in Minnesota. One of these protests happened on a really warm late spring day

in downtown Denver. Crowds of people were chanting and walking from Civic Center up Colfax Avenue. We were in the middle of the pandemic. It was a Saturday, and I was there talking to people. Mostly, I wanted to hear about their experiences or perceptions of police. It was one of the many protests that were happening at the time in Denver and Aurora. While I was walking with people, I saw Mari Newman.

She's a civil rights lawyer, kind of fiery, with a head full of curly red hair. She said, you need to do more stories about the local George Floyds in Colorado, specifically about Elijah McClain. She said, he's Colorado's George Floyd. His family had been grieving and demanding answers for almost a year. The city and the news media had not focused on Elijah's death. Here at Colorado Public Radio, we hadn't reported on it much at all. Following a high-profile shooting that same summer, we decided to do a big investigation on incidents where police had shot people. Because Elijah wasn't shot, he wasn't included in our investigation. But then, the big and sustained protests meant people started paying more attention to what happened to Elijah.

And that included me. Shanine didn't go to a lot of the protests. She preferred other ways of advocating for her son. But on June 2nd, outside the state capitol, she was there. last August. Can I tell y'all that? I'm appreciative that you guys are out here now. Maybe you guys were a little too busy in August last year, but he needs y'all now still. They got away with murder. Y'all hear me? They got away with murder. So what y'all gonna do about that, Colorado? What y'all gonna do about that, Colorado Colorado? We'll see won't we? Tell them.

Say his name! Elijah McClain! Say his name! Elijah McClain! Say his name! Elijah McClain! Say his name! Elijah McClain! Elijah McClain! Elijah McClain! Elijah McClain! Elijah McClain!

After nearly a year of being ignored, and the case essentially being closed in Aurora, Elijah McClain's death got worldwide attention. Shanine would meet Breonna Taylor's family. She was killed by police in Kentucky after they botched a raid on her apartment. The families united in their quest to get justice for their kids and to change policing. One of the biggest sports stars in the world at the time, Naomi Osaka, put Elijah's name on a face mask she wore at the U.S. Open. During the tournament, Osaka, who has a Japanese mother and a Haitian-American father, donned seven masks, each bearing the name of a Black person who was killed. Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain, Ahmaud Arbery, Trayvon Martin, George Floyd, Philando Cassidy. The point is to make people start talking.

Osaka won the tournament, attracting more attention to Elijah's story. Artists from across the country and other parts of the world made tributes to Elijah. And here in Aurora, there was a special kind of vigil. A Grammy-nominated violinist flew to Colorado from the East Coast. Along with a friend, he invited people to play Elijah's chosen instrument, out in a field with police choppers circling overhead. It wasn't just the protests and remembrances. Five million people signed a Change.org petition demanding justice for Elijah. Calls, emails, handwritten letters started pouring into Aurora from around the world.

To anyone in elected office to get justice for Elijah McClain's death. At some points, they come in at a rate of one every 8 to 15 seconds. Daphna Michelson-Jenay represents Aurora in the statehouse. Quite frankly, the outpouring here, not one single issue has brought me more emails than specifically Elijah McClain in the entire time I've served in the legislature. I look at what's happening as that tipping point for the change that we need. It absolutely was a tipping point. Quickly, a bill to strengthen accountability for police in a bunch of fundamental ways became the top priority for legislators. It wasn't just the uproar over Elijah's death that spurred it. As lawmakers sat in session, instances of bad policing were happening right out in front of the Capitol building, when police

fired chemical weapons and rubber munitions into peaceful protests. It all led to one major piece of legislation. It happened fast, and it included a few reforms that activists had been pushing for for years, rights that people in the community thought they shouldn't have to fight for. The legislation required body cameras. It put limits on using force, including banning chokeholds. Among other things, it makes it easier for people to sue police if their rights are violated. Colorado became the first state in the country to tackle wholesale police accountability reform

in the wake of George Floyd's murder. It was extraordinary to see a lot of Republicans, in addition to Democrats, support these changes. State Representative Leslie Harrod was the main person behind this bill. Too often we had just seen officers who had acted harmfully in our communities just walk away scot-free. And that just shouldn't happen. Or they resigned from one agency and then went to work at another one. That's another thing that the bill does, is it makes sure that these officers can't work in Colorado as a law enforcement officer again. In addition to the new law, there was a pretty big shift among prosecutors on holding officers accountable.

District attorneys were way more willing to charge officers for misconduct, whether it was shooting and killing someone, using excessive force, or failing to intervene when another officer was out of line. They were taking misconduct to grand juries. I hadn't ever seen as many law enforcement officers in court as defendants as frequently as I started to then. But for people like Shanine, who was watching all of this as an advocate, this cultural shift was bittersweet. You know, it's crazy to think that all the laws that should have been in place, Elijah had to lose his life in order for them to be in place. It's hard to think that the amount

of humanity that we have toward each other, we don't have enough of it until something else happens, until something else bad happens. There's all these policies that are being changed, but there's still police officers that are doing the wrong thing. And none of those changes, both culturally and in actual law, directly addressed Elijah's death and whether anyone would be held accountable for it. So, at the end of June 2020, amid the protests, Governor Jared Polis decided to reopen the case. He gave the state attorney general Phil Weiser the unprecedented power to investigate and prosecute officers and paramedics involved in Elijah McClain's death. It was an unheard-of move from the state's highest elected official.

It signaled that the outrage on Elijah McClain's behalf changed the minds of people who had the power to do something. Just over a year later, Weiser announced indictments. After careful and thoughtful deliberation, the grand jury returned a 32-count indictment against Aurora police officers Randy Rodima and Nathan Woodyard, former Aurora police officer Jason Rosenblatt, and Aurora Fire Rescue paramedics Jeremy Cooper and Peter Czachuniak for their alleged conduct on the night of August 24, 2019, that resulted in the death of Mr. McClain. Five men with their hands on Elijah that night are charged with felonies, manslaughter, and criminally negligent homicide. All but one of them are also charged with assault.

Shanine had long hoped they would all go to prison. When she heard about the charges, she was overwhelmed. I'm shocked at the amount of counts, honestly. And I'm happy for my son's justice. I'm happy that Elijah's getting his justice. She said she was grateful for what Attorney General Phil Weiser had done. Everyone on his team,

everyone at the grand jury that sat through all of that information, all that evidence, and watched the videos over and over again, I appreciate them tremendously. During the grand jury's deliberations, where they ultimately decided to charge the officers and paramedics, there was a key change from what we'd known about this case. I got a tip last year that Elijah McClain's autopsy had been amended during the grand jury investigation, which is normally very secretive.

As a news organization, CPR requested that new autopsy, but the Adams County coroner said it was part of the investigative file of this case, and she wasn't going to release it. So, Colorado Public Radio sued her, the Adams County coroner said it was part of the investigative file of this case and she wasn't going to release it. So Colorado Public Radio sued her, the Adams County coroner, and we ultimately won that case. She gave us the autopsy. And that's when we found out the autopsy was changed from an undetermined cause of death to death by ketamine. Earlier this year, all of the officers and paramedics pleaded not guilty to the charges of manslaughter, homicide, and assault. In court hearings leading up to this, all five defendants had already begun to point fingers at each other.

The officers blamed the paramedics since, officially, Elijah died from ketamine. The paramedics were last on the scene, and they were told to give it to him. Elijah had already been beaten up when they got there. The prosecutors will say, if it wasn't for all five of them and their individual behaviors, Elijah would still be alive. But the legal responsibility for Elijah's death isn't all that's on trial. Beyond the laws the officers and paramedics allegedly broke, independent investigators found mistakes they made, basically from the moment they came in contact with Elijah.

And those mistakes were symptoms of huge problems inside the Aurora Police Department. Just a couple weeks after the grand jury formally charged officers and paramedics in Elijah's death, the attorney general spoke again. He said the Aurora Police Department had done the same kinds of things repeatedly and systematically for years. Our investigation included extensive data analysis and direct observation. The Attorney General's office had done a, quote, patterns and practices investigation, which was the first of its kind in Colorado. Weiser was given this authority by the law that passed in the height of the protests in summer 2020. We attended over nine months of weekly force review board meetings,

and we observed how Aurora evaluates the conduct of its officers. They wrote along with officers, read thousands of reports, and interviewed residents and people in law enforcement. The conclusion, Weiser said, was clear. Specifically, we found that Aurora Police has a pattern and practice of racially biased policing, treating people of color and Black individuals in particular differently from their white counterparts. Second, Aurora Police has a pattern and practice of using excessive force. We observed officers using force to take people to the ground without first giving them adequate time to respond. The findings read like a playbook for how officers handled their encounter with Elijah McClain, including how they used ketamine to subdue him. Our investigators

observed a consistent pattern of illegal ketamine administration. Wiser went on, Aurora police had not meaningfully reviewed officers' use of force. And they did not get rid of the officers who violate their own policies or the law. Those are some of the reasons this kind of misconduct had festered for so long. For the first time, the state dissected the practices of a specific police department. It also set out a roadmap to make things better. Aurora agreed to five years of oversight to improve its policing. All of this appeared to mark a watershed moment for policing in Colorado. But the attorney general's revelations about Aurora's

track record were not surprising at all to a community that had tried to draw attention to the racist policing going on there. Phil did not present anything that he did not know, that we did not know, that the officers of Aurora Police Department did not know. What he did, though, was actually put some teeth into what we knew. Hashim Coates is a political strategist and community activist. He heard warnings about police when he was young growing up in northeast Denver. Aurora has always been that scary place. I remember when I was 16 getting my license.

Do not drive to Aurora. If you go to Aurora, be careful. Right now, as a resident of Aurora, he's not seeing the changes in policing you might expect. The state's oversight and the new laws for police conduct aren't adding up for Hashim. I mean, you don't change years of culture in three years, two years. He says, yes, officers are sometimes facing charges now. Like two years after Elijah died, when Aurora police beat up and strangled a black man who was just sitting on the ground talking to some other guys.

Those officers faced criminal consequences and no longer work at the police department. So that's punishment that's different. It's not the policing that's different. If the policing had been different, he wouldn't be traumatized. How much the police in Aurora actually change their culture and their behavior comes down to who is driving that change and whether they'll truly make community trust and safety their top priority.

Yes, the attorney general has legal authority to keep pushing the Aurora Police Department to be better. But someone actually has to make the change happen. When State Attorney General Phil Weiser made this announcement and unveiled these findings, Aurora had a police chief who said she was open to them. But less than a year later, she got fired. She was let go explicitly because, the city manager said, she didn't have the trust of officers. Because, they say, she spent too much time out of the office talking to the community. Aurora's current interim police chief is Art Acevedo. He's led a lot of big city police departments around the country, and he came in talking about reform. Our department is better than the critics would have you believe, but it certainly isn't perfect,

which was some may want to think. It is a department that we don't need to be torn down and rebuilt. We've got good bones here, right? This is not a teardown. He says he wants to make it better. He insists most officers in Aurora want some of the same things that their biggest critics do. They want good policing. They want people to be held accountable,

and they want to make sure that we're consistent. Clear our expectations, consistent in the way we treat people when they fall short. Shanine McClain has continued her fight for accountability for Elijah's death. She and other families sued Aurora. The city agreed to pay what was one of the largest known settlements for police violence in the history of the state, $15 million. That day in November 2021, we talked to Shanine on a cell phone. She said she felt numb. She told me, I wish Elijah was here now and I didn't have this pile of money. But, she said, what the

settlement communicated is that Aurora was accountable for her son's death. Shanine says she'll never live in Aurora again. She's in Denver now. For her, true justice goes beyond criminal responsibility and Elijah's death. Moving forward, I want all the laws to be changed so that it doesn't happen to anybody anymore, not just in the state of Colorado, but all around the world. As his mom, this is going to be my mission for the rest of my life. Some people get to walk away from it like it's a job. Some people get to turn the page like it's another news article. But this is something that

is my mission, ask his mom to fight for Elijah's justice. The trials for officers and paramedics are expected to continue through the end of the year. So far, Shanine has been sitting in court alone, next to lawyers and reporters, hearing in vivid detail about the last moments her son was alive. That was Colorado Public Radio justice reporter Allison Sherry. The full version of this audio documentary is in the podcast Colorado In Depth, available wherever you get your podcasts. It was produced and edited by Rachel Estabrook with mixing and sound design by Emily Williams. Thanks to Kevin Dale, Shakia Wedgworth-Hallowell, and Brad Turner. To stay updated on the trials, go to cpr.org. This episode of The Sunday Story was produced by Justine Yan and edited by Jenny Schmidt.

Audio engineering by Josh Newell. Music from Audio Network, First Com Music, Blue Dot Sessions, and Rom Team, Ara Bluey. Liana Simstrom is our supervising producer and Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. I'm Aisha Roscoe. Up first, we'll be back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week. Until then, have a great rest of your weekend.