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Former Colorado paramedic sentenced to 5 years after conviction in death of Elijah McClain
One of the two paramedics who were found guilty of criminally negligent homicide in the death of Elijah McClain was sentenced on Friday.
Former Aurora Fire Rescue paramedic Peter Cichuniec was sentenced to 5 years in prison — the minimum sentence — and 3 years of probation on Friday by Adams County District Judge Mark Warner. He said the sentence and the example it might send are tied to public safety, but also said he does not believe Cichuniec is a risk to the public.
McClain was walking home in August 2019 when the 23-year-old Black man was confronted by police officers who forcibly restrained him and then the Aurora Fire Rescue paramedics — Jeremy Cooper and Cichuniec — injected him with ketamine.
Aurora Police Department
He went into cardiac arrest in an ambulance a few minutes later and died three days after that.
Cooper and Cichuniec were both convicted on charges of criminally negligent homicide in December 2023.
Cichuniec was also found guilty of second-degree assault-unlawful administration of drugs, a conviction that typically carries a 5- to 16-year prison sentence. He appeared in court in a prison jumpsuit in handcuffs Friday.
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Peter Cichuniec’s friends and family
During victim impact statements, several family members and friends spoke on behalf of Cichuniec.
Lainey Garrison, a friend and former neighbor of Cichuniec and his family, was the first to speak.
“Pete is one of the best people I know,” she said, her voice breaking. “He’s the last person that would have any ill intent or hatred toward anyone.”
Garrison said her kids grew up playing with Cichuniec’s kids and are a similar age.
His wife Katie Cichuniec and sons Jack and Ryan Cichuniec then stood together at the podium. His wife Katie said through tears that the approximately 100 letters of support of her husband received by the court don’t begin to speak to his character as a husband and father.
“Pete has always been my rock but never more than in 2021 when I was diagnosed with breast cancer,” she said. “He was at every single appointment.”
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“He literally held me up and helped me walk when I was sick from treatment,” she continued. “That’s his character. He has never been cruel or intentionally hurt anyone with his actions or words.”
Jack Cichuniec, Peter’s 21-year-old son, said his father has been a constant source of inspiration and support amid a bone marrow disorder diagnosis.
“As an adult, I consider him one of my closest friends,” he said. “My dad consistently embodies the spirit of a selfless man, who I consider a hero.”
“I hope to be half the man, husband, father and citizen that he is,” he said, before requesting the judge impose the minimum sentence.
Ryan Cichuniec, Peter’s other son, said his father “was always there.”
“He’s an honorable man,” he said. “I would really appreciate you giving him leniency.”
Following statements from his family, fellow emergency medical professionals defended Peter Cichuniec and, at times, criticized the prosecution. One said the jury lacked understanding of the job of paramedics.
Peter Cichuniec then took the stand himself.
“I wish I could tell Ms. McClain that Elijah was going to be okay,” he said, just as he said he wished he could tell many loved ones of deceased victims in incidents he responded to. “But I can’t.”
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“We can’t save everyone. I wish my mind could forget the things my eyes have seen over the last 18 years,” he continued. “Elijah will always be on my mind, along with all the others.”
He said he and his fellow paramedics never had the opportunity to go through video previously recorded by security cameras or police body-worn cameras, saying they had to make a “split-second decision” and didn’t have time to second-guess the police’s words at the scene.”
“I’m truly sorry for the loss of her son’s life,” he said of Sheneen McClain, Elijah’s mother. “I’m begging for mercy from the court.”
His attorney asked the judge for leniency in sentencing, including rehabilitation, saying there was no evidence that his client intended to hurt Elijah McClain.
Elijah McClain’s friends and family
Sheneen McClain spoke about her son during the victim impact statement portion of the hearing. She described having admired firefighters growing up until her son died at the hands of two paramedics.
“You cannot say you’re not training people to be robots when they find no fault in their actions,” she said. “I watched my son’s murder on bodycam video so many times because I want to know why they didn’t save him.”
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Multiple times, Sheneen McClain characterized her son’s death as a “murder” and his detention by police and paramedics as a “kidnapping.”
“Elijah will never be a husband or a father,” she continued. “I have righteous anger toward those that made sure my son would never see another day.”
Sheneen McClain concluded: “Divine justice for my son, Elijah McClain.”
Jason Slothouber, one of the prosecutors, spoke about Elijah McClain’s personality, caring for everyone around him while trying to better himself. He characterized the killing as just one in a long line of unarmed Black men killed at the hands of police and other first responders and the shattering of trust between those responders and the public, both in Aurora and beyond.
He said Cichuniec knew he gave Elijah McClain too much ketamine and was the senior-most medical professional at the scene the night McClain was taken to the hospital.
After the judge ruled on the case, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser issued a statement, calling that sentence accountability for Cichuniec’s actions.
“No action will bring Elijah back or take away the pain and loss that his mother, Sheneen McClain, continues to experience,” he said, in part. “But today’s sentence from the court is one of accountability for the defendant’s criminal negligence in the death of Elijah McClain. It sends a strong message that no profession, whether a paramedic, a nurse, a police officer, an elected official, or a CEO should be immune from criminal prosecution for actions that violate the law and harm people.”
McClain’s death, investigation and other court cases
In Elijah McClain’s 2019 death, the coroner’s office in Adams County initially couldn’t determine how McClain died, but after social justice protests drew attention to the case, a medical examiner ultimately found that he died from complications of ketamine following forcible restraint. That led to a 2021 indictment of three police officers — Randy Roedema, Jason Rosenblatt and Nathan Woodyard — and the two paramedics.
Throughout their weeks-long trial, the use of the sedative that Cooper and Cichuniec injected McClain with and the amount given to him came under scrutiny. In 2018, Colorado state regulators had approved the drug for someone who was in an “agitated state” and showing signs of “excited delirium.” The defense for both men argued that was the case — that they were following their training by giving ketamine to McClain because he was showing an unusual amount of strength as he was being restrained and was acting in a strange way, they said.
Three officers from the Aurora Police Department have been tried in connection to McClain’s death. Last fall, two of the officers were acquitted in Elijah’s death and a third was found guilty.
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A jury found Randy Roedema guilty of criminally negligent homicide and third-degree assault, while Jason Rosenblatt was found not guilty of manslaughter and assault in October 2023. A jury also found Nathan Woodyard not guilty of manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide in the 23-year-old’s death. Since the verdict, he has returned to the Aurora Police Department.
In January, Roedema was sentenced to 14 months in jail along with 4 years of probation. He has filed an appeal and is asking the court to review nine different aspects of the case.
The City of Aurora agreed in 2021 to pay $15 million to settle a civil lawsuit brought by McClain’s parents.
Cooper, the other paramedic who was convicted, is scheduled to be sentenced on April 26.
RELATED: Read all our coverage of Elijah McClain here
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In 2000, Malcolm Gladwell published the first of several bestselling books, “The Tipping Point,” in which he applied the laws of epidemics to promote positive social change. Now, he’s returned to that optimistic book’s lessons in “Revenge of the Tipping Point” (to be published October 1 by Little, Brown & Co.), to examine the flip side of those theories.
The new book’s topics range from cheetah reproduction and the Harvard women’s rugby team to the Holocaust.
Read the excerpt below, and don’t miss David Pogue’s interview with Malcolm Gladwell on “CBS Sunday Morning” September 29!
“Revenge of the Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell
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In the 1970s, zookeepers around the world began to invest more and more resources in breeding their animal populations in captivity. The logic was clear. Why go to all the trouble of capturing animals in the wild? The growing conservation movement also favored breeding programs. The new strategy was a big success — with one big outlier: the cheetah.
“They seldom had offspring that survived, and many of them when put together couldn’t breed,” remembers the geneticist Stephen O’Brien, who was then working at the National Cancer Institute.
It didn’t make sense. The cheetah seemed a perfect example of evolutionary fitness: a massive nuclear reactor for a heart, the legs of a greyhound, a skull shaped like a professional cyclist’s aerodynamic helmet, and semi-retractable claws that, as O’Brien puts it, “grip the earth like football cleats as they race after their prey at sixty miles per hour.”
“It’s the fastest animal on earth,” O’Brien said. “The second fastest animal on earth is the American pronghorn. And the reason that it’s the second-fastest is that it was running from the cheetahs.”
The zookeepers wondered if they were doing something wrong, or whether there was something about the make-up of the cheetah that they didn’t understand. They came up with theories and tried experiments — all to no avail. In the end, they shrugged and said that the animals must be “skittish.”
Things came to a head at a meeting in 1980 in Front Royal, Virginia. Zoo directors from around the world were there, among them the head of a big wildlife-conservation program in South Africa.
“And he says, ‘Do you have anybody that knows what they’re doing scientifically?’ ” O’Brien remembers. ” ‘[To] basically explain to us why our breeding program of cheetahs in South Africa has something like 15 percent success while the rest of these animals — elephants and horses and giraffes — they breed like rats?’ “
Two scientists raised their hands — both colleagues of O’Brien’s. They flew to South Africa, to a big wildlife sanctuary near Pretoria. They took blood and sperm samples from dozens of cheetahs. What they found astonished them. The sperm counts of the cheetahs were low. And the spermatozoa themselves were badly malformed. That was clearly why the animals had such trouble breeding. It wasn’t that they were “skittish.”
But why? O’Brien’s laboratory then began testing the blood samples that had been sent to them. They had done similar studies in the past on birds, humans, horses, and domestic cats, and in all those cases the animals showed a healthy degree of genetic diversity: In most species, around 30 percent of sampled genes will show some degree of variation. The cheetah’s genes looked nothing like that. They were all the same. “I never saw a species that was so genetically uniform,” O’Brien said.
O’Brien’s findings were greeted with skepticism by his colleagues. So he and his team kept going.
“I went down to Children’s Hospital in Washington and I learned how to do skin grafts at a burn unit,” he said. “They taught me how to keep it sterile and how to take the . . . slices and how to suture it up and everything. And then we did [skin grafts on] about eight cheetahs in South Africa, and then we did another six or eight in Oregon.”
Winston, Oregon, was home to the Wildlife Safari, the largest collection of cheetahs in the United States at the time.
The idea was simple. If you graft a piece of skin from one animal onto another, the recipient’s body will reject it. It will recognize the genes of the donor as foreign. “It would blacken and slough off in two weeks,” O’Brien said. But if you take a patch of skin from, say, one identical twin and graft it onto another, it will work. The donor’s immune system thinks the skin is its own. This was the ultimate test of his hypothesis.
The grafts were small — one inch by one inch, sewn onto the side of the animal’s chest, protected by an elastic bandage wrapped around the cat’s body. First, the team gave some of the cheetahs a skin graft from a domestic cat, just to make sure the animals had an immune system. Sure enough, the cheetahs rejected the cat graft: It got inflamed, then necrotic. Their bodies knew what different was — and a domestic cat was different. Then the team grafted skin from other cheetahs. What happened? Nothing! They were accepted, O’Brien said, “as if they were identical twins. The only place you see that is in inbred mice that have been brother-sister mated for twenty generations. And that convinced me.”
O’Brien realized that the world’s cheetah population must have at some point been devastated. His best guess was that it happened during the great mammal die-off 12,000 years ago — when saber-toothed cats, mastodons, mammoths, giant ground sloths, and over thirty other species were wiped out by an ice age. Somehow the cheetah survived. But just barely.
“The numbers that fit all the data are less than one hundred, maybe less than fifty,” O’Brien said. It’s possible, in fact, that the cheetah population was reduced to a single pregnant female. And the only way for those lonely few cheetahs to survive was to overcome the inhibition that most mammals have against incest: Sisters had to mate with brothers, first cousins with first cousins. The species eventually rebounded, but only through the endless replication of the same narrow set of genes. The cheetah was still magnificent. But now every cheetah represented the exact same kind of magnificence.
From “Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering” by Malcolm Gladwell. Copyright © 2024 by Malcolm Gladwell. Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group. All rights reserved.
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Pope Francis promised Saturday to “offer all the help we can” to aid clergy sexual abuse victims, after a group of Belgian survivors told him first-hand of the trauma that had shattered their lives and left many in poverty and mental misery.
Francis’ visit to Belgium has been dominated by the abuse scandal, with King Philippe and Prime Minister Alexander De Croo both blasting the Catholic Church’s dreadful legacy of priests raping and molesting children and its decades-long cover-up of the crimes.
Francis met for more than two hours late Friday with 17 survivors who are seeking reparations from the church for the trauma they suffered and to pay for the therapy many need. They said they gave Francis a month to consider their requests, which the Vatican said Francis was studying.
“There are so many victims. There are also so many victims who are still completely broke,” survivor Koen Van Sumere told The Associated Press. “I have also been lucky enough to get a diploma and build a life for myself. But there are so many people who are completely broke and who need help and who cannot afford it and who really need urgent help now.”
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Van Sumere said he was encouraged by the “positive” meeting with the pope, but was waiting to see what comes of it. The meeting itself was intense, victims said, “It was at certain moments very emotional and at certain moments it was very rough. When the pope was told things he did not agree with, he also let it be known so there was real interaction,” Van Sumere said.
He said he hoped as a first step that the pope would receive the victims at the Vatican in the spring during Holy Week. “And then we can not only celebrate the resurrection of Christ but perhaps also the resurrection of all victims in Belgium,” he said.
On Saturday, during a meeting with Belgian clergy and nuns at the Koekelberg Basilica, Francis acknowledged that the abuse scandal had created “atrocious suffering and wounds,” and undermined the faith.
“There is a need for a great deal of mercy to keep us from hardening our hearts before the suffering of victims so that we can help them feel our closeness and offer all the help we can,” he said.
He said the Belgian church must learn from victims and serve them. “Indeed, one of the roots of violence stems from the abuse of power when we use the positions we have to crush or manipulate others,” he said.
Francis has met with victims in the United States, Ireland and Canada, as well as in multiple occasions at the Vatican. He has cracked down on some bishops who failed to protect their flocks by passing new church rules on investigations and punishments. But the scandal has continued to fester, and Francis’ record is uneven, with several high-profile cases still pending or seemingly ignored.
Most galling to Belgians was that it took the Vatican 14 years to laicize Bruges Bishop Roger Vangheluwe, who admitted in 2010 to having abused his nephew for 13 years. Francis defrocked him in March in a move widely seen as attempting to remove a problem before his visit.
After the encounter, Francis went to the royal crypt in the Church of Our Lady to pray at the tomb of King Baudouin, best known for having refused to give a parliament-approved bill legalizing abortion his royal assent, one of his constitutional duties.
Baudouin stepped down for one day in 1990 to allow the government to pass the law, which he was required to sign, before he was reinstated as king.
Francis praised Baudouin’s courage when he decided to “leave his position as king to not sign a homicidal law,” according to the Vatican summary of the private encounter, which was attended by Baudouin’s nephew, King Philippe, and Queen Mathilde.
The pope then referred to a new legislative proposal to extend the legal limit for an abortion in Belgium, from 12 weeks to 18 weeks after conception. The bill failed at the last minute because parties in government negotiations considered the timing inopportune.
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Francis urged Belgians to look to Baudouin’s example in preventing such a law, and added that he hoped Baudouin’s beatification cause would move ahead, the Vatican said.
With the visit, Francis waded straight into Belgian politics and dragged the royal family along with him.
The royals are bound by strict neutrality and the palace immediately issued a statement distancing itself from the visit. The statement said the “spontaneous visit, on the pope’s request, was not part of the official program” and added the king and queen were there only “out of hospitality toward the pope.”
Francis started the day by having breakfast — coffee and croissants — with a group of 10 homeless people and migrants who are looked after by the St. Gilles parish of Brussels.
They sat around a table at the entrance of the parish church and told him their stories, and gave him bottles of beer that the parish makes, “La Biche de Saint-Gilles.” The proceeds of the beer sales help fund the parish’s charity works.
Francis thanked them for the beer and breakfast and told them that the church’s true wealth was in caring for the weakest.
“If we want to truly know and show the church’s beauty, we should give to one another like this, in our smallness, in our poverty, without pretexts and with much love.”
The breakfast encounter was presided over by Marie-Françoise Boveroulle, an adjunct episcopal vicar for the diocese. The position is usually filled by a priest, but Boveroulle’s appointment has been highlighted as evidence of the roles that women can and should play in the church.