Prosecutors from the Colorado Attorney General’s Office dropped sentence-enhancing counts for assault charges against two Aurora police officers who face criminal charges connected to the 2019 death of Elijah McClain.

The two officers, Randy Roedema and Jason Rosenblatt, still face charges of reckless manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide – a lesser, included charge to the manslaughter count – and second-degree assault causing serious injury.

Colorado’s sentence enhancement law triggers a mandatory minimum sentence if a person is convicted of one of the crimes included in it. Causing serious injury or death is covered by the statute. The law carries a sentence of at least the midpoint in a crime’s presumptive sentencing range. 

Altogether, three Aurora officers and two paramedics face charges for McClain’s death. McClain died in August 2019, several days after the three officers subdued him and one of the paramedics injected him with ketamine. McClain, 23 at the time, went into cardiac arrest on the way to a hospital. He was taken off life support Aug. 30.

Trial pushed back for two Aurora police officers accused in Elijah McClain’s death

He had been walking home from a convenience store the night of the Aug. 24 encounter. A caller reported a person acting suspiciously to 911, prompting police officers to respond. However, McClain was not suspected of any crime.

The officers subdued McClain, handcuffed him and used a type of neck hold intended to gain control of a person by temporarily stopping the flow of blood to their brain, according to the indictment of the officers and paramedics. 

Roedema was the senior officer at the scene, responsible for directing other officers, according to the indictment. Among the accusations, he and Rosenblatt held McClain down, and, at one point, Roedema shoved his torso into the ground.

Prosecutors opted to dismiss the sentence enhancement counts against Roedema and Rosenblatt after District Court Judge Mark Warner granted defense attorneys’ request for a document known as a “bill of particulars,” Warner wrote in a dismissal order last week. In the filing, the prosecutors would have laid out their theory of how the case’s facts support the sentence enhancement counts.

“There was some lack of clarity concerning how the specific acts of these defendants would have caused death,” Warner wrote.

He said the officers’ defense attorneys objected to dismissing the counts, claiming the move was a “veiled attempt to end-run the court’s bill of particulars order.” 

He, nevertheless, found the dismissals are within prosecutors’ discretion to decide what counts to go to trial on. Other news reports indicated prosecutors ultimately decided the sentence enhancement counts were redundant and unnecessary.

The indictment said Officer Nathan Woodyard stopped McClain initially, being the first officer on the scene. It accused him of putting McClain in the neck hold that caused him to go temporarily unconscious.

Paramedic Jeremy Cooper is accused of making the decision and injecting McClain with ketamine. The indictment said neither he nor paramedic Peter Cichuniec spoke to McClain, checked his vital signs or physically examined him. 

The officers and paramedics originally faced 32 counts altogether, including criminally negligent homicide, manslaughter and second-degree assault causing serious injury. Cooper and Cichuniec also face a count each of second-degree assault with a deadly weapon – ketamine – and unlawfully administering the sedative without consent.

Attorneys request trial delay for two Aurora officers charged in Elijah McClain’s death

The five have three separate trials scheduled: Roedema and Rosenblatt will go on trial together in September, Woodyard will be tried separately in October, and Cooper and Cichuniec will go on trial together in late November. 

Cichuniec and Cooper still face two sentence enhancer counts each, court records show. Woodyard’s case does not include any sentence enhancers.