The inmate who stabbed former police officer Derek Chauvin in prison said he did on Black Friday in connection to Black Lives Matter, investigators say.
John Turscak stabbed Chauvin 22 times at the Federal Correctional Institution in Tucson and said he would have killed Chauvin had officers not responded so quickly, federal prosecutors said.
The former member of the Mexican mafia said he thought about attacking Chauvin for a month because the former officer, convicted of murdering George Floyd, is a high-profile inmate.
He added he attacked Chauvin on Black Friday as a symbolic connection to the Black Lives Matter movement, which garnered widespread support in the wake of Mr Floyd’s death, and the ‘Black Hand’ symbol associated with the Mexican Mafia, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors have argued Turscak used an improvised knife to attack Chauvin in the prison’s law library on November 24.
The Bureau of Prisons said employees stopped the attack and performed ‘life-saving measures’. Chauvin was taken to a hospital for treatment.
Turscak later denied wanting to kill Chauvin, prosecutors said.
Turscak, 52, is also charged with assault with intent to commit murder, assault with a dangerous weapon and assault resulting in serious bodily injury.
The attempted murder and assault with intent to commit murder charges are each punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
Chauvin, 47, was sent to FCI Tucson from a maximum-security Minnesota state prison in August 2022 to simultaneously serve a 21-year federal sentence for violating Mr Floyd’s civil rights and a 22-and-a-half-year state sentence for second-degree murder.
Chauvin’s lawyer, Eric Nelson, had advocated for keeping him out of the general population and away from other inmates, anticipating he would be a target.
In Minnesota, Chauvin was mainly kept in solitary confinement ‘largely for his own protection’, Mr Nelson wrote in court papers last year.
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