McClain died in 2019 after a struggle with police that ended when paramedics injected him with a sedative.
AURORA, Colo — The prosecution's final witness in the case against two officers charged withwas a forensic pathologist who testified that he believed McClain's manner of death should be classified as a homicide.
"How does the physical restraint by the officers here, if it does, contribute to Elijah McClain’s death?" asked prosecutor Jason Slothauber. "There’s a lot of video that's available. It's not often that you get so much video you’re looking at, particularly, the clinical presentation of someone who is dying," Mitchell said."I thought it was important to spend a considerable amount of time with the video to see how the patient changes over the course of the video.”He, like a doctor who previously testified, told the jury that he believed McClain began to suffer from several issues as a result of being restrained.
Eventually, Mitchell described McClain becoming unresponsive in the minutes before he was given the sedative and suggested that officers could have done something during the roughly 15 minutes that McClain was on the ground and handcuffed. "What, in all that we’ve seen, is the proper classification of manner of death for Elijah McClain? asked prosecutor Jason Slothauber.Defendant Randy Roedema walks into the Adams County Justice Center for trial Wednesday, Sept. 20, 2023, in Brighton, Colo.