3 Officers Fired Over Photos Taken Near Elijah McClain Memorial
The Aurora, Colo., police chief said the officers mocked the death of Mr. McClain, a 23-year-old massage therapist who died several days after officers put him in a chokehold last summer.
Three Aurora, Colo., police officers have been fired over photos that show two of them grinning and mocking the death of Elijah McClain, a 23-year-old massage therapist who was arrested and placed in a chokehold last August. Mr. McClain died several days later.
Vanessa Wilson, the interim chief of the Aurora Police Department, said she fired the officers on Friday morning for conduct unbecoming. A fourth officer resigned on Tuesday.
“While the allegations of this internal affairs case are not criminal, it is a crime against humanity and decency,” Chief Wilson said at a Friday afternoon news conference. “To even think about doing such a thing is beyond comprehension and it’s reprehensible. It shows a lack of morals, values and integrity, and a judgment that I can no longer trust to allow them to wear this badge.”
Chief Wilson shook her head as she revealed a photo of Officers Erica Marrero, Kyle Dittrich and Jaron Jones grinning in selfies they took last October near a memorial that had been set up in Mr. McClain’s memory. Another photo showed Officer Dittrich smiling widely as Officer Jones wraps his arm around his neck. Officer Marrero is grinning in the background.
The photos were then sent to Officer Jason Rosenblatt, one of the three officers who arrested Mr. McClain last summer.
He texted back “haha,” according to Chief Wilson. Officer Rosenblatt, who has been with the department for three years, was fired on Friday along with Officers Marrero and Dittrich. Officer Jones resigned on Tuesday.
“I am disgusted to my core,” said Chief Wilson, who apologized several times to Mr. McClain’s family during the news conference. She also apologized to police officers nationwide whose reputations she said were unfairly besmirched by the actions of the officers in her department.
On Aug. 24, 2019, Mr. McClain was walking home from a convenience store when someone called 911, saying he “looked sketchy” and was wearing a ski mask and waving his arms.
The police arrived and, though Mr. McClain had not been accused of a crime, they started to restrain him.
In the blurry body camera footage of the arrest, Mr. McClain can be heard telling the officers he is an introvert and wants them to leave him alone.
One of the officers is heard saying Mr. McClain reached for another officer’s weapon, but that cannot be seen in the footage.
The encounter escalates as officers threaten to use a Taser if he doesn’t stop fighting. One of the officers places him in a carotid hold, which restricts blood to the brain to render someone unconscious.
“I can’t breathe,” Mr. McClain can be heard gasping. “Please stop.”
After paramedics arrived, they injected Mr. McClain with ketamine, a powerful sedative.
On the way to a hospital, Mr. McClain went into cardiac arrest. He died three days later.
Mr. McClain’s case is one of many deadly encounters between Black people and the police that are receiving new scrutiny after the death of George Floyd in May, who gasped for breath as a Minneapolis police officer kept his knee on his neck.
After Mr. Floyd’s death, celebrities began sharing Mr. McClain’s story on social media. More than four million people have signed an online petition demanding that the officers involved in his arrest be held accountable for his death.
During the spring, Mr. McClain’s mother urged state legislators to enact sweeping changes to policing tactics, including banning the use of chokeholds. The city of Aurora banned carotid control holds last month.
The photographs, however, did not surface until last week, when Chief Wilson said she learned about them from another officer in the department who was “disgusted” by them and reported the incident to a supervisor.
That officer, who was not identified, learned of the photos in March and struggled for months over what he should do, Chief Wilson said.
She added that he came forward after talking to his wife and realizing that no one planned to say anything about the pictures.
“There are cops who have integrity,” Chief Wilson said. “They understand duty and they understand honor.”
She added: “These four don’t get it.”
Chief Wilson said the officers told her they took the photo to “cheer up” Nathan Woodyard, one of the three officers involved in Mr. McClain’s arrest.
Officers Rosenblatt, Woodyard and Randy Roedema were placed on administrative leave after Mr. McClain’s death and later reinstated. Dave Young, the district attorney for Adams County, decided not to file criminal charges against the officers, citing an autopsy report that stated the pathologist was unable to connect the officers’ actions with Mr. McClain’s death.
The F.B.I. and the Justice Department are investigating Mr. McClain’s death, and Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado has asked the state attorney general to investigate the case, Chief Wilson said.
Chief Wilson said Officer Woodyard also received a copy of the photos but did not reply and deleted them immediately.
She said Officer Woodyard told her he was “extremely disturbed” by the photos.
Chief Wilson said she met with Mr. McClain’s mother Friday morning to show her the photos before they were released to the public.
“No one has the right to see these pictures before she sees these pictures,” Chief Wilson said. “This is her son. Her son being mocked.”
Mari Newman, a lawyer for Mr. McClain’s family, compared the photos to images of people smiling next to the bodies of Black people who had been lynched.
“What we have seen is pictures of Aurora police officers taking pictures just like racists in the Jim Crow South,” she said during a news conference on Friday near the memorial site.
In an email, Ms. Newman said seeing those photos was a “gut punch” to Mr. McClain’s parents.
“They were stunned by the callousness and depravity of those officers,” Ms. Newman said.
She described the department on Friday as “rotten to the core.”
Officers Dittrich and Jones were hired in 2016. Officer Marrero joined the department in 2018.
The Aurora Police Association, which represents the department’s officers, said the “internal investigation was conducted in an unprecedented fashion.”
The union said the officers were ordered to be interviewed with short notice, had little time to prepare for their disciplinary process and had their phones confiscated.
“All of these steps ordered by Interim Chief Wilson were violations of the officer’s due process rights,” the union said in a statement. “This investigation is a rush to judgment.”
Chief Wilson said the officers voluntarily handed over their phones. She said she had every right to accelerate the disciplinary process and noted that she gave the officers three days to provide more information before she made her final decision.
“None of them sent me any additional information,” Chief Wilson said.
Chief Wilson said she was planning to meet with community leaders to get their feedback on how the department could regain the city’s trust.
She said the Police Department had changed its directive on how to respond to the kind of 911 calls that led to Mr. McClain’s death. Chief Wilson said the department was also examining its training procedures.
“I shouldn’t have to teach this,” she said. “There is no training that should have to teach human decency.”
Police uniform, mock RCMP cruiser key parts of investigation into N.S. shootings
Public shouldn’t be allowed to buy components from decommissioned police cars, says automotive technician
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As Gabriel Wortman moved undetected throughout Nova Scotia for hours, carrying out a deadly rampage that left 22 victims dead, he was helped by the fact that he was driving a mock RCMP cruiser and wearing what police described on Tuesday as “an authentic police uniform.”
His vehicle looked “identical in every way to a marked police car,” the RCMP have said.
The only detectable difference, police pointed out on Twitter, were five characters written on the side of the vehicle, which were circled in a photo distributed to the public during the hunt for the suspect.
“It wasn’t actually an RCMP vehicle, but it was made to look identical to one, and we will trace back every part of that vehicle to find out how that happened,” RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki said.
Another white Ford Taurus, similar to the one used during the rampage, was parked at the property of Wortman’s denture clinic in Dartmouth on Monday. By Tuesday, it had been removed.
How could someone get a mock RCMP cruiser and a real Mountie uniform?
“I would think he had a source somewhere,” retired Toronto police homicide detective David Perry, now the CEO of Investigative Solutions Network, told CBC News.
Police haven’t yet said how the shooter was able to obtain the uniform or the mock cruiser, or whether anyone helped him.
They’re two of many questions police are trying to answer as they piece together the suspected shooter’s movements and motivations.
While the RCMP have promised to get to the bottom of how the shooter built an authentic-looking police cruiser, it’s not clear how much they’ll be able to learn from the vehicle itself.
It was one of two vehicles that were engulfed in flames at the scene of RCMP Const. Heidi Stevenson’s death on Sunday, police confirmed.
Decommissioned police vehicles commonly sold
A quick search online shows it’s not difficult to track down RCMP patches.
The federal government also routinely sells decommissioned, unmarked police vehicles, stripped of things like decals and light bars, on its surplus website.
It’s a common practice that gives the vehicles a second life, according to Nova Scotia-based David Giles, an automotive technician and vice-president of All EV Canada, which focuses on developing the electric vehicle market.
“A decommissioned police or service vehicle going to a second life, like a taxi, delivery vehicle, things like that, even personal use, it’s not a big deal,” Giles said.
“It’s great. It’s good for the environment, good for the vehicle, plus also the enforcement agencies that are putting those vehicles back out for second life.”
What Wortman had, though, wasn’t that.
He appears to have bought a new vehicle in an attempt to make it look like a new police car, according to Giles. The photo shared by RCMP showed what looked like a sticker from a car dealership in the passenger-side window.
“Even on a dealer’s lot, I believe you can buy that vehicle. You can buy that as a service vehicle,” Giles said.
“It doesn’t always mean it’s a police car. It could go to security companies, it could go to whoever wants to buy it, with the blacked-out wheels and so on.”
‘Those parts should be restricted’
While police surplus vehicles typically have the light bar and other components stripped when sold, Giles said he saw a pallet of light bars from decommissioned police vehicles for sale at an auction in Nova Scotia just a few weeks ago.
Anyone, he said, could bid on those items.
But he doesn’t think they should be sold to the public.
“Those parts should be restricted,” he said.
“I feel that there’s no purpose for somebody to own a police light bar for a vehicle or sirens or strobe units. What’s the purpose of it?”
Dean Goodine has worked on several film and TV productions where he’s needed an authentic-looking police car, whether it’s an RCMP cruiser in North of 60 or a sheriff’s car in an American movie.
When a police agency appears in a movie or on a TV show, the production staff usually need to submit badges and graphics for clearance ahead of time, according to Goodine, who is a motion picture and television property master based in Summerland, B.C.
“We operate under strict legal guidelines,” Goodine said.
“But a private citizen who decides that he wants to go off book and do this, it would be not that hard.”
In fact, Goodine estimates he could put together a full package, with a replica uniform and vehicle, in only a week, using a large colour printer and the internet marketplace.
“It’s just based on time and commitment.”
If you are seeking mental health support during this time, here are resources available to Nova Scotians.
