谢宁·麦克林23岁的儿子，以利亚·麦克林大约一年前，他在科罗拉多州奥罗拉去世，就在几天前，警察在他从一家便利店回家的路上与他对峙。
“我真的不认为我的愤怒或…我的不安会改变，”她告诉美国广播公司新闻。“我想我总是会有同样程度的愤怒。”
以利亚·麦克莱恩的家人说，冲突涉及过度使用致命武力。警方称这是正当的。他的案子已经结案，涉案的警察被允许重返工作岗位。
现在，在乔治·弗洛伊德去世后，抗议充斥了街道，伊莱贾·麦克莱恩的案子得到了新的关注，包括在他的家乡所在的州。
“这很伤人，因为我真的不明白为什么科罗拉多没有像乔治·弗洛伊德甚至布莱纳·泰勒那样支持以利亚，”谢宁·麦克林说。“现在每个人都在尖叫，但是...去年，这将会有很大的不同。”
谢宁·麦克林的儿子以利亚·麦克林在科罗拉多州奥罗拉的一家便利店回家的路上遭遇警察后几天就去世了。
现在，从丹佛到纽约，她儿子的名字在全国各地的游行中被反复吟唱。成千上万的人走上街头，在网络运动和请愿的推动下，突出了一个又一个美国黑人被警察杀害的案例和缺乏责任感。
“乔治·弗洛伊德一案改变了游戏规则，”马克·拉蒙特·希尔，一位媒体研究教授、作家和活动家，告诉《夜生活》“这为执法部门询问各种问题打开了大门。”
本周，成千上万的抗议者挤满了科罗拉多州的街道。一个组织关闭了丹佛的一条繁忙的高速公路。有一次，奥罗拉警察穿着防暴服，用胡椒喷雾和催泪瓦斯驱散人群，打破了麦克莱恩家乡的和平守夜。
希尔补充道:“事实上，总是需要一场公众斗争才能获得逮捕、起诉和起诉，这说明司法系统未能提供迅速的司法，对许多人来说，司法拖延实际上是司法被剥夺了。”。
伊莱贾·麦克莱恩，一个手无寸铁的黑人，在2019年8月被三名警察制服并注射了强力镇静剂后几天死亡，在科罗拉多州奥罗拉的一张未注明日期的照片上摆姿势
谢宁·麦克林说她的儿子总是内向。她说他会通过艺术来表达自己的害羞天性。
“作为一个内向的人，你必须找到不同的交流方式，”她说。“他热爱知识...他就是这样自学演奏乐器——小提琴的。”
“他开始的时候很有趣，因为我想，‘你怎么能同时演奏所有这些乐器?’他说，‘我会做的，’”她补充道所以，我们看了，他也看了……看到他对自己的技能如此着迷，真是太神奇了，我们也都被迷住了。所以，是的，相当惊人。"
到去年，以利亚·麦克莱恩已经做了几年的按摩治疗师，他计划上大学。
2019年8月24日晚上10点左右，以利亚·麦克莱恩去他家附近的一家便利店买了一些软饮料。在商店的监控录像中，可以看到他戴着滑雪面罩。他的家人说他戴着它是因为他患有贫血，这是一种会让人更容易感到寒冷的血液疾病，而面具让他保持温暖。
马克·拉蒙特·希尔是一位媒体研究教授、作家和活动家，他谈到了以利亚·麦克莱恩的案例。
麦克莱恩去商店的时候，有人打911报警说有一个可疑的人。提到麦克莱恩，打电话的人说他戴着面具，说他看起来“很粗略”，但又说“他可能是个好人或坏人”当被询问时，打电话的人告诉接线员没有武器，没有人有危险。接线员告诉他，警察正在去检查的路上。
警察内森·伍德亚德、杰森·罗森布拉特和兰迪·罗德马在伊莱贾·麦克莱恩回家的路上拦住了他，其中一人告诉他，根据警方的人体摄像录像，他“有所怀疑”。麦克林回应道，“我有权去我要去的地方。”
军官们立即抓住了麦克莱恩，他一再告诉他们让他走。
“我是个内向的人。请尊重我所说的界限，”麦克莱恩恳求道。“我要回家了……别烦我。你们开始逮捕我，我停下音乐来听。”
“这是一个小孩……个子小，身材小。这个人可能被一名警官拘留，当然不需要三名警官，一个喉咙和一片镇静剂，”希尔说。“事实上，我们无法在摄像机上看到所有这些，因为他们说摄像机掉了，这也是一个很大的危险。”
三名警察的身体摄像头中有两个在几秒钟内被移走并掉落在地上。第三架相机也捕捉到了坠落前更多的挣扎。
麦克莱恩家族的律师玛丽·纽曼告诉美国广播公司新闻，“从法律上来说，根本没有理由让警察阻止他。”。
“当他说‘我正要回家’时。我正要回家。我是个内向的人。“请尊重我的界限，”他们抓住他。他们抓住了他。他们把他扔到了地上，”她说。
奥罗拉警察局发布了这具尸体的摄像机镜头，描述为“这是2019年8月24日与伊莱贾·麦克林接触时的尸体磨损摄像机镜头。”
当警察试图逮捕麦克林时，他给了他们他的身份证，告诉他们他的名字，并告诉他们他正要回家。
视频播放两分钟后，可以听到伊莱贾·麦克林反复说，“我无法呼吸”——这句话已经成为一个全国性的口号。他告诉警察他很痛苦。可以听到其中一名警官在视频中说，他们正在使用一种“颈动脉”，一种限制颈动脉、切断大脑血液的阻塞物。
当麦克莱恩恳求警察时，可以听到其中一个人说他戴着面具来为这次行动辩护。他还说，他看到以利亚·麦克林伸手去拿他们的一把枪。
随着越来越多的警察到来，最初的三名警察四处寻找他们的人体摄像头。他们把它们捡起来重新定位——其中一个被关掉了。
玛丽·纽曼和麦克莱恩一家认为缺少清晰的人体摄像镜头是故意的。
“这三名警官都故意移动了他们的身体摄像头，”她说，指着一名警官录音中的一个部分，一名按住麦克莱恩的警官告诉另一名警官移动他的摄像头。
在视频中，可以听到警官说:“移动你的相机，伙计。”
纽曼说，“所以，他故意试图远离人体摄像头，因为他们对以利亚·麦克莱恩施加了多种不同的力量。”
在此期间，多名警察将麦克莱恩拘留在地上。这位23岁的年轻人一度生病并呕吐。当急救人员到达时，他们给他注射了500毫克的镇静剂氯胺酮。不久之后，麦克莱恩被送上救护车，在那里他心脏病发作。
奥罗拉警察局发布了这具尸体的摄像机镜头，描述为“这是2019年8月24日与伊莱贾·麦克林接触时的尸体磨损摄像机镜头。”
一到医院，谢宁·麦克林就说“警察花了很长时间才对我坦白。”
她拍摄了她儿子在接受生命支持时的身体伤害。最终，医生宣布他脑死亡，三天后，他被停止了生命支持。
“骨中之骨，肉中之肉。那是我的一部分。她说:“没有办法在上面贴创可贴，他总是会离开的。“他走了。所有这些都应该在他被杀之前完成。那些允许他们走那么远的法律根本就不应该存在。”
地方检察官戴夫·杨接手了对伊莱贾·麦克莱恩死因的调查。他说，当他第一次看到视频时，他的“最初印象”是氯胺酮导致了以利亚·麦克莱恩的死亡。
“直到我收到法医尸检报告，我才知道，事实上，这不是死亡的原因，”杨告诉美国广播公司新闻。“事实上，我们不知道麦克林的死因。”
地方检察官戴夫·杨调查了与伊莱贾·麦克莱恩之死有关的官员，并在三个月后澄清了他们的不当行为。不过，他说他希望他们的行为有所不同。
杨说，如果警官的行为导致了以利亚·麦克莱恩的死亡，他无法“证明这一点或那一点”。
他说“我不知道”警官的行为是否导致了麦克莱恩的死亡。
“举证责任在我，”杨说。“如果我不能向一个12人的陪审团证明有导致他死亡的行为，那我就不能提出刑事指控。”
去年11月，地方检察官宣布，他们不会对这些官员提出指控，在调查期间，这些官员被赋予了行政职责。
“我不会宽恕那些军官的行为，”杨说事实上，我希望他们会有不同的做法。但是我不能……如果有人说他们不能呼吸，放开他。动手吧，放开他!"
希尔指出，有一段历史，白人带着武器在没有暴力的情况下被拘留——甚至在伊利亚·麦克林死去的同一个城市。
希尔谈到2012年在科罗拉多州奥罗拉的一家电影院枪杀12人的凶手时说:“看看詹姆斯·霍姆斯，一个大规模杀人的白人，能够毫无意外地被逮捕。”。“不知何故，当涉及到白人嫌疑人时，警方设法找到了一种他们对黑人嫌疑人所没有的纪律、关心和耐心，即使他们没有携带武器。”
除了呼吁为乔治·弗洛伊德和布莱纳·泰勒伸张正义之外，全国各地出现的抗议活动也呼吁对较老的案件追究责任。目前有几份请愿书要求杨辞职，其中一份已经有5万人签名。
“现在，我不会考虑这样做，”杨说。”“我袖手旁观我的决定。不幸的是，人们觉得通过表达他们的观点，这将改变事实和调查的规律。"
尽管如此，公众压力还是引发了行动。科罗拉多州在本月早些时候通过了一项警察改革法案，对警察参与的杀人行为采取了新的问责措施。上周四，科罗拉多州州长贾里德·波利斯任命该州司法部长菲尔·魏泽为特别检察官，调查伊莱贾·麦克莱恩的死因，并可能提出指控。
希尔说:“任命了一名特别检察官，他们仍在调查此事，无论是正式的还是非正式的，这表明公众的强烈抗议很重要。”。“当人们关注并让机构承担责任时，这些机构的反应将与没有人关注时不同。”
伍德亚德、罗森布拉特和勒厄德马这三名警官已被解除执法职责，并被重新分配。谢宁·麦克林认为他们应该在监狱里度过一生。
“对我来说，正义……就是信念。…就像，他们需要受苦。监狱生活对我来说太棒了。老实说，他们需要为他们的所作所为被定罪，因为这是不公正的，”她说。
麦克林现在意识到以利亚已经不仅仅是她的儿子，他已经成为一个象征。
“我们会一直叫‘他的名字’。”她说我们会每天大声喊出来，如果黑人的生命不重要，所有的生命都不重要。革命就是现在。不再等待了。"
What happened to Elijah McClain? Protests help bring new attention to his death
Sheneen McClain’s 23-year-old son,Elijah McClain, died nearly a year ago in Aurora, Colorado, just a few days after police confronted him as he was walking home from a convenience store.
“I honestly don’t think my anger or … me being upset is gonna change,” she told ABC News. “I think I’m always going to have that same level of being pissed off.”
Elijah McClain’s family says the conflict involved a deadly use of excessive force. The police called it justified. His case was closed and the police officers involved were allowed to return to work.
Now, in the wake of George Floyd’s death, protests have filled the streets and Elijah McClain’s case has been given new attention, including in his home state.
“It hurts because I honestly didn’t understand why Colorado wasn’t there for Elijah like they were for George Floyd or even Breonna Taylor,” Sheneen McClain said. “Everybody’s screaming names now, but ... last year it would have made a big difference.”
Sheneen McClain's son, Elijah McClain, died a few days after police in Aurora, Colorado, confronted him while walking home from a convenience store.
Now, it’s her son’s name chanted at marches across the country, from Denver to New York City. Thousands of people have taken to the streets, fueled by online campaigns and petitions, highlighting case after case of Black Americans killed by police and a lack of accountability.
“The George Floyd case was a game changer,” Marc Lamont Hill, a media studies professor, author and activist, told “Nightline.” “That opened up the door for questioning all sorts of stuff when it comes to law enforcement.”
This week, thousands of protesters filled the streets of Colorado. One group shut down a busy highway in Denver. At one point, Aurora police dressed in riot gear, dispersing crowds using pepper spray and tear gas to break up a peaceful vigil in McClain's hometown.
“The fact that it always takes a public struggle in order to get an arrest and an indictment and a prosecution speaks to the failure of the system to provide swift justice, and for many people, justice delayed is, in fact, justice denied,” Hill added.
Elijah McClain, an unarmed Black man who died days after he was subdued by three policemen and injected with a powerful sedative in August 2019, poses in an undated photograph in Aurora, Colo.
Sheneen McClain says her son was always introverted. She said he’d channel his shy nature by expressing himself through art.
“As an introvert you have to find different ways of communication,” she said. “He loved knowledge... That’s how he taught himself how to play the instruments -- the violin.”
“It was interesting when he started because I was like, ‘How are you gonna play all these instruments at one time?’ And he’s like, ‘I’m gonna do it,’” she added. “So, we watched and he did… It was amazing to see him so enchanted with his own skill, and we were all enchanted, too. So, yeah, pretty amazing.”
By last year, Elijah McClain had been working as a massage therapist for several years and he had plans to go to college.
On the night of Aug. 24, 2019 around 10 p.m., Elijah McClain went to a convenience store near his home to buy some soft drinks. In surveillance video from the store, he can be seen wearing a ski mask. His family says he was wearing it because he had anemia, a blood condition that can make people feel cold more easily, and the mask kept him warm.
Marc Lamont Hill, a media studies professor, author and activist, speaks about Elijah McClain's case.
While McClain was making his trip to the store, someone had called 911 to report a suspicious person. Referring to McClain, the caller described him wearing a mask said he looked “sketchy” but added that “he might be a good person or a bad person.” When asked, the caller told the operator that there were no weapons and that no one was in danger. The operator advised him that officers were on their way to check it out.
When officers Nathan Woodyard, Jason Rosenblatt and Randy Roedema stopped Elijah McClain on his way home, one telling him that he was “being suspicious,” according to police body camera video. McClain responded, “I have a right to go where I am going.”
The officers immediately grabbed McClain, who repeatedly told them to let him go.
“I am an introvert. Please respect the boundaries that I am speaking,” McClain pleaded. “I’m going home… Leave me alone. You guys started to arrest me, and I was stopping my music to listen.”
"This is a small kid … small in height, small in build. Somebody who probably could have been detained by one officer and certainly didn’t require three officers, a chokehold and a sedative,” Hill said. “And the fact that we can’t see all of it on camera because they say that the camera dropped is also a big red flag.”
Two of the three officers’ body cameras became dislodged within seconds and fell to the ground. The third camera captured a little more of the struggle before it fell, too.
“There was absolutely no reason legally why the officers should have stopped him in the first place,” Mari Newman, a lawyer for the McClain family, told ABC News.
“When he said ‘I’m just going home. I'm just going home. I'm an introvert. Please respect my boundaries,’ they grabbed him. They tackled him. And they threw him to the ground,” she said.
The Aurora Police Department released this body cam footage with the description "This is the Body Worn Camera footage from the August 24, 2019 contact with Elijah McClain."
As police tried to apprehend McClain, he offered them his ID, gave them his name and told them he was just going home.
Two minutes into the video, Elijah McClain could be heard repeatedly saying, “I can’t breathe” -- a phrase that has become a national rallying cry. He told officers he was in pain. One of the officers could be heard saying in the video that they were using a “carotid,” a type of chokehold that restricts the carotid artery, cutting off blood to the brain.
As McClain was pleading with the officers, one of them could be heard justifying the takedown by saying he was wearing a mask. He also said that he saw Elijah McClain reach for one of their guns.
As more officers arrived, the original three looked around for their body cameras. They picked them up and repositioned them -- one was turned off.
Mari Newman and the McClain family believe the lack of clear body camera footage was on purpose.
"All three of those officers intentionally dislodged their body cameras," she said, pointing to a part on one officer’s recording where one officer who is holding down McClain tells another officer to move his camera.
In the video, the officer can be heard seen and heard saying, “Move your camera, dude.”
Newman says, “So, he’s intentionally trying to stay off of the body camera as they inflict multiple different kinds of force on Elijah McClain.”
During this time, multiple officers are holding McClain on the ground. At one point, the 23-year-old gets sick and vomits. When EMTs arrived, they gave him at shot of 500 milligrams of ketamine, a sedative. Soon after, McClain was loaded into the ambulance, where he had a heart attack.
The Aurora Police Department released this body cam footage with the description "This is the Body Worn Camera footage from the August 24, 2019 contact with Elijah McClain."
Once at the hospital, Sheneen McClain said “it took so long for [the police] to just be honest with me.”
She photographed her son’s physical injuries while he was on life support. Eventually, doctors declared him brain dead and, three days later, he was taken off life support.
“Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. That was a part of me. There's no way to put a band-aid on that, he's always gonna be gone,” she said. “He's gone. All this should have been done before he was killed. Those laws that allowed them to even go that far should’ve never been in place.”
The investigation into Elijah McClain’s death was taken up by District Attorney Dave Young. He said that when he first saw the videos, his “initial impression” was that the ketamine caused Elijah McClain’s death.
“It wasn’t until I received the forensic autopsy report that I learned that, in fact, was not the cause of death,” Young told ABC News. “In fact, we don’t know the cause of McClain’s death.”
District Attorney Dave Young investigated the officers involved in Elijah McClain's death and cleared them of wrongdoing after three months. Still, he says he wishes they had acted differently.
Young said he could not “prove one way or the other” if the police officers’ actions led to Elijah McClain’s death.
He said “I don’t know” whether the officer’s actions led to McClain’s death.
“The burden of proof is on me,” Young said. “If I can’t prove to a jury of 12 that there’s actions cost his death then I cannot file criminal charges.”
In November, the district attorney announced they would not bring charges against the officers, who had been placed on administrative duty during the investigation.
“I don’t condone the officers’ actions out there,” Young said. “In fact, I wish they would have done things differently. But I cannot… If someone’s saying they can't breathe, get off of him. Do it, just get off of him!”
Hill points out there’s a history of white men with weapons getting taken into custody without violence – even in the same city Elijah McClain died.
“Look at James Holmes, a white man who was a mass murderer, was able to be arrested without incident,” Hill said of the murderer who shot and killed 12 people at a movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado in 2012. “Somehow, when it comes to white suspects, police managed to locate a level of discipline and care and patience that they don't for black suspects, even ones who were unarmed.”
In addition to calls for justice for George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the protests that have emerged around the country have been calling for accountability in older cases as well. There are currently several petitions demanding that Young resign, including one that’s accrued 50,000 signatures.
“Now, I'm not going to consider doing that,” Young said. "“I stand by my decision. It’s unfortunate that people feel that by voicing their opinions that that’s going to change the facts and the law of the investigation.”
Still, the public pressure has sparked action. Colorado passed a police reform bill earlier this month with new accountability measures for officer-involved killings. Last Thursday, Colorado Governor Jared Polis appointed the state’s Attorney General Phil Weiser as special prosecutor to investigate Elijah McClain’s death and potentially file charges.
“The fact that a special prosecutor is being appointed and they’re still looking into this, both formally and informally suggests that public outcry matters," Hill said. “When people pay attention and hold institutions accountable, those institutions will respond differently than if nobody is watching.”
All three officers, Woodyard, Rosenblatt and Roedema have been taken off enforcement duties and reassigned. Sheneen McClain believes they should spend life in prison.
“Justice to me … is conviction. … Like, they need to suffer. Life in prison would be great for me. Honestly, they need to be convicted for what they did because it was unjust,” she said.
McClain now realizes that Elijah has become much more than just her son, he’s become a symbol.
“We're gonna keep saying' his name,” she said. “We're gonna shout it even louder every day, All lives can't matter if Black lives don't matter. The revolution is now. Ain't no more waiting' for it.”
