Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin has returned to prison custody after he was stabbed 22 times by a fellow inmate during an attack that took place on Black Friday.
Chauvin, who is serving 22 1/2 year sentence after killing George Floyd in May 2020, was reportedly stabbed by fellow inmate John Turscak, 52, who is now charged with attempted murder.
Federal prosecutors said Turscak admitted to stabbing Chauvin with an improvised knife inside the Federal Correctional Institution in Tucson, Arizona law library and said he would have killed Chauvin had correctional officers not responded so quickly.
Prosecutors said Turscak told FBI agents that he’d been thinking about assaulting Chauvin for about a month because he is a high-profile inmate but denied wanting to kill him. 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.
Chauvin, 47, was sent to FCI Tucson from a maximum-security Minnesota state prison in August 2022. He's service a 21-year federal sentence simultaneously with the 22 1/2 year state sentence.
Chauvin's legal team is working to get him out of the Tucson prison and into another facility unless major changes are made.