A detainee at a federal prison was charged on Friday with attempted murder in the prison stabbing of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd.
John Turscak stabbed Chauvin 22 times in the law library at the Tucson federal correctional institution in Arizona with an improvised knife, prosecutors said. Turscak, 52, told correctional officers he would have killed Chauvin had they not responded so quickly, according to prosecutors.
Turscak later told FBI agents he had been thinking about assaulting Chauvin for about a month because he is a high-profile inmate but denied wanting to kill him, prosecutors said.
Turscak told the agents that he attacked Chauvin on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, as a symbolic connection to the Black Lives Matter movement and the “Black Hand” symbol associated with the Mexican mafia gang, prosecutors said.
An attorney for Turscak was not listed in court records. Turscak, who has represented himself in numerous court matters from prison, remained in custody on Friday.
Chauvin, 47, was sent to the Tucson prison from a maximum-security Minnesota state penitentiary in August last year to simultaneously serve a 21-year federal sentence for violating Floyd’s civil rights and a 22-and-a-half-year state sentence for second-degree murder.
A lawyer for Chauvin, Eric Nelson, had advocated for keeping him out of 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”, Nelson wrote in court papers last year.
Floyd, who was Black, died on 25 May 2020 after Chauvin, who is white, pressed a knee on his neck for nine and a half minutes on the street outside a convenience store where Floyd was suspected of trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill.
Bystander video captured Floyd’s fading cries of, “I can’t breathe”. His death touched off intense protests worldwide and forced a national reckoning with police brutality and racism.
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