Elijah McClain is becoming a household name. His mother is hurt that it’s taken so long.

In the weeks following Elijah McClain’s death last summer, his mother, Sheneen, would sit in her car and cry for up to three hours at a time.

“Now it’s down to about an hour and a half,” Sheneen says.

She cries when she sees his face in pictures. She drives around with dozens of photos of Elijah, and sometimes gifts them to others so that, as one family friend put it, “they can hold that weight, too.”

She cries when she drives by the intersection of Billings Street and Evergreen Avenue in Aurora. Elijah lived in an apartment at that corner, along a frontage road to a highway that’s dotted with low-income housing complexes.

A quarter-mile down Billings sits the gas station where Elijah bought some iced tea last Aug. 24. On the short walk home, he was confronted by police who accused him of being “suspicious” because he had been reported wearing a mask and waving his arms. Elijah — who wore the mask because he was anemic and got cold easily — pleaded with them: “I am an introvert. Please respect my boundaries that I am speaking.” Three officers — Jason Rosenblatt, Nathan Woodyard and Randy Roedema — took Elijah, a pacifist, to the ground. The cops, who’ve kept their jobs and who’ve faced no charges, called for medical aid for Elijah, and Aurora Fire Rescue later injected ketamine into his body in an attempt to sedate him. He went into cardiac arrest before he reached the hospital and was taken off of life support on Aug. 30. He was 23.

After he died, Sheneen McClain would drive to Billings and Evergreen often. Sometimes she’d tend to the grassy area along Billings where a small memorial site still stands, with a cross, flowers, lights and candles. She grew up gardening and finds peace in it, and so she’d pull out weeds around the memorial and sometimes that made her feel a little bit better. But she doesn’t go there as much these days.

“It’s heartbreaking,” she says. “Every time I ride by, it hurts. His blood is on the ground in that area.”

Sometimes, Sheneen says, she cries just because.

“The wind will blow, and I’ll think about him,” she told The Denver Post this week.

For a long time, there weren’t too many others sharing in her burden. Elijah’s been dead for almost a year, but he only became a household name after George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis, sparking protests in Colorado and across the world. Sheneen has spoken publicly about how much it hurt her to see locals show up in force for Floyd, but not for her son.

“I’m appreciative that you guys are out here now,” she said earlier this month on the Colorado Capitol steps, to a large crowd. “Maybe you guys were a little too busy in August last year.”

It took a while, but they’re showing up now. “Say his name: Elijah McClain!” is a common refrain at protests, and his name and story are all over social media. Sheneen has done more media interviews in the last few weeks than she can count. Politicians and celebrities are tweeting about Elijah, and photos and video of him have racked up millions of views. A GoFundMe page for the McClain family had collected more than $1.8 million as of late Friday afternoon — money that will help open a foundation and community center in Elijah’s name. On Saturday, thousands are expected to gather in Aurora for a march to demand justice for him.

This is all of little comfort to Sheneen.

“It doesn’t make me feel better that a year later people are becoming aware of it,” she says. “It’s still the same for me, because what was taken from me can never be taken back.”

Where, she wonders, were all the hashtags and celebrities and protest chants last summer and fall?

Terrance Roberts, a community activist who got to know the McClains last October, recalls some of the early demonstrations for Elijah.

“The first time, it was literally like six people there, maybe seven people, right there at the Aurora Municipal Center, right at the police station. We had a bullhorn, we talked a little crap on the bullhorn. No one cared. The next time we had maybe 10 people,” he says. “I’m happy that they’re showing up now, because without that we wouldn’t have it on ‘The Today Show,’ we wouldn’t have Katie Couric tweeting about it, and Kourtney Kardashian and all these different people. But I’m also cognizant, and I remember, that initially people weren’t interested. They just weren’t.”

Last year Sheneen tried to gin up interest, reaching out to Black celebrities who never got back to her. No major politicians got in touch, she says, except for U.S. Rep. Jason Crow, who represents Aurora. To this day, Sheneen says, she hasn’t heard from Aurora Mayor Mike Coffman, who, Westword reported in November just before Coffman took office, vowed to make the McClain case his top priority.

On Nov. 23, a few dozen people gathered at the Municipal Center, crying, “Murderers! Murderers!” in reaction to news that the officers in Elijah’s case would not be charged. It was a larger crowd than some earlier rallies had attracted, but it was still a minor event, with no real audience beyond a few journalists.

Sheneen was supposed to speak that day but was too emotional. She sobbed in the background as others took the mic.

Later, after crying, she offered brief remarks: “I don’t want to be here,” she said, adding, “Let’s get ourselves together and do something to make some real shit happen.”

Nothing much did happen in the months that followed.

“I’m not going to say we wanted to give it a rest,” says Roberts, “but were we a bit dejected and depressed about it? Yes, we were. We just felt like no one’s ever going to care.”

One big reason that people seem to care now is that Elijah was, by all accounts, an unusually gentle person. The viral social media posts have mostly not concerned the details of the police violence against him, or the ketamine injection. Instead, they’ve been videos of him smiling and dancing, or stories about him playing the violin for cats, or posts noting that he was a vegetarian who literally refused to hurt flies.

It’s sad, says local activist and protest organizer Isabella Dominique, that Elijah almost had to be so angelic to get everyone’s attention.

“It’s incredibly important to talk about victims of police murder as people, as they were, to get to know them so we aren’t desensitizing and dwindling them down to a hashtag,” Dominique says. “But at the same time, the way people are talking about him, it’s almost as though he didn’t deserve to die because he was such a sweet boy. He didn’t deserve to die because he didn’t deserve to die.”

On Thursday afternoon at the memorial site on Billings Street, Roberts and McClain family friend and activist Candice Bailey looked over to the spot where McClain was first confronted by police, and they wondered aloud whether there’d be any public outcry had they, and not Elijah, been the victims that night.

“I’m a felon. She’s a felon,” Roberts says. “I’m an ex-gang member. I was in prison 10 years, and I’ve been gunned down twice. And if it was me, people probably would’ve cared even less.”

Says Bailey: Elijah’s story “grabs ahold of the little old white lady that loves cats, that’s raising some grandbabies and could potentially keep this cycle of hate going. He grabs the violin player. My white friend who happens to be (in) an orchestra, she brings her people.

“So this is what grabs people’s humanity, but the saddest part is that they didn’t (care) even when he was that great all along.”

Last summer, before the world found out how great he was, Elijah spent his last days in a medically induced coma. His hospital room was under heavy police surveillance, Sheneen says, and family members were told not to record video or take down doctors’ names. She says she was kicked out of the hospital after asking about whether Elijah’s comatose body could be released to her, and that she did not see his body again until a couple months later, at the morgue.

All the while, she had, and still has, no choice but to keep busy. She has five surviving kids, four of whom rely on her for transportation. She doesn’t have much money, and up until recently she drove a 1994 Toyota Corolla, the hood of which had blown off on the highway. She’d replaced it with a tarp, and after Elijah died she taped photos of him to the windows.

That car failed, and now she has a roomier one — a Dodge that she says she bought with donated money — to drop off her kids at work and pick them up when their shifts are over. She doesn’t want them walking home.

“I just don’t feel safe with my kids in the streets anymore,” she says.

On Thursday, Gov. Jared Polis ordered Attorney General Phil Weiser to serve as a special prosecutor in a new investigation into Elijah’s death, and, “if deemed necessary,” to charge the officers. Bailey says she’s glad that happened, but that those who’ve been in this fight since last year will have trouble believing anyone will be charged or convicted until they see it happen. In lieu of justice for her son — Sheneen says that would involve life in prison for the officers, and humiliation for their supporters — she’s so far had to settle for mere support, and awareness. She still doesn’t understand why the world is only just now speaking Elijah’s name.

“The selective protesting, the selective accountability, is terrible in America,” she says. “So many times we don’t do what’s right until other people do it first.”

Asked whether she is hopeful that actual justice, as she defines it, will ever be served, Sheneen says, “Not at all.”

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