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Cichuniec, who’d served as a firefighter and paramedic for 18 years, was also convicted of second-degree assault for giving a drug without consent or a legitimate medical purpose.
During Friday’s sentencing hearing, Cichuniec gave a tearful statement, saying he wished he could make changes to “have a positive outcome” for McClain.
“I can’t, and that destroys me as a person, as a father and as a paramedic,” he said.
Adams County District Judge Mark Warner acknowledged during the hearing the “many letters received by the court that Mr. Cichuniec is an individual of good character.” But, he added, he also had to consider the “death of a young man who is simply walking home from a convenience store.”
“It is impossible to unremember the video and images of Elijah McClain’s suffering in the last minutes of his young life,” Warner said during the sentencing.
McClain — a massage therapist who played violin at a local shelter to soothe the animals — was walking home in August 2019. He was wearing headphones and a ski mask covering his face when a driver called 911 to report a “sketchy” person. Three Aurora police officers arrived and went on to tackle McClain to the ground, restraining him in a way that caused him to go in and out of consciousness.
When Cichuniec and the other responding paramedic, Cooper, arrived at the scene, they gave McClain ketamine. McClain later went into cardiac arrest while being transported to the hospital.
On Aug. 30, McClain was taken off life support and died.
McClain’s death received renewed attention in 2020, when George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police sparked a racial reckoning and intense scrutiny of cases in which unarmed Black people were killed, including Breonna Taylor in Kentucky and Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia.
In June 2020, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) signed a sweeping police accountability law as a means to “create a new normal where everyone’s rights are respected,” he said at the time. A month later, Aurora’s interim police chief fired three officers who mocked McClain’s death in a reenactment, The Washington Post previously reported. Since McClain’s death, Colorado you have banned police chokeholds and limited the use of ketamine by paramedics during arrests.
The state attorney general’s office also launched a probe into McClain’s death — resulting in a 2021 report that found that Aurora police had a pattern of racially biased policing and use of excessive force. The investigation, The Post reported, prompted the city to enter a consent decree to appoint a third-party monitor to reform the practices of its police and fire departments.
That same year, a grand jury indicted the two paramedics and three Aurora police officers who arrested McClain.
Two of the officers were acquitted of all charges. The third was sentenced in January to 14 months behind bars after being found guilty of criminally negligent homicide and assault.
Throughout the paramedics’ trials, prosecutors accused Cichuniec and Cooper of failing to properly monitor McClain and conduct basic medical checks. The paramedics recklessly administered too much ketamine to McClain’s 140-pound body, prosecutors said.
The defense argued that none of the paramedics knew that McClain had been placed in a carotid hold, a technique that restricts blood flow to the brain. Knowing so, they said, would have influenced their decision to inject the ketamine.
Although the paramedics’ attorneys claimed that the police officers’ actions were to blame for McClain’s death, experts testified that the ketamine shot was too much for an already weakened McClain. Prosecutors told McClain told police “I can’t breathe” several times as he was handcuffed on the ground.
McClain’s mother, Sheneen McClain, told the judge Friday that video showed first responding “smirking at my son’s turmoil.”
“Every firefighter that was there that night felt no responsibility,” she said. “They felt no need to stop the brutality that was happening to my son as I pleaded for his life.”
Kim Bellware, Anumita Kaur and Andrea Salcedo contributed to this report.
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