On the evening of August 24, 2019, Elijah McClain was on his way home from a convenience store when he was accosted by three officers -- Nathan Woodyard, Jason Rosenblatt, and Randy Roedema -- who said they were on the lookout for a suspicious person. McClain was a 5’6”, 140-pound, anemic vegetarian. Yet officers claimed he fought all three of them with “crazy strength,” enough to warrant placing him in a now-banned carotid chokehold, cutting off blood supply to his brain, and injecting him with ketamine, a drug often used to tranquilize horses. Bodycam footage of the incident tells a different story, however, showing McClain gasping for air, repeatedly saying “I can’t breathe” while the officers ignore his pleas and threaten to unleash their dogs on him if he moves a muscle. Three days after arriving in hospital, McClain was pronounced brain dead. “The fact that Elijah McClain was someone who played violin to cats at a shelter and was an innocent person who wouldn’t hurt a fly but the police still killed him and are still trying to make it seem as if he were a criminal. It tells us...what we already know, it is a criminalization of blackness in and of itself,” said activist-defendant Northam.