New Details Emerge About Stabbing of Ex-Cop Derek Chauvin

On Friday, a federal inmate was charged with attempted murder in the prison stabbing of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer who was convicted of murdering George Floyd.

Chauvin was stabbed 22 times by inmate John Turscak in the law library at the Federal Correctional Institution in Tucson, Arizona, with an improvised knife. According to federal prosecutors, Turscak, 52, told correctional officers he would have killed Chauvin if they hadn’t responded as quickly as they had. 

He later told FBI agents he’d been considering an attack on Chauvin for about a month because he is a high-profile inmate, but denied that he wanted to kill him.

Turscak claimed to agents that he attacked Chauvin on Black Friday as a symbolic connection to the Black Lives Matter movement and the “Black Hand” symbol associated with the Mexican Mafia.

An attorney for Turscak was not listed in court records, and Turscak, who has represented himself in numerous court matters from prison, remained in custody on Friday.

“I am sad to hear that Derek Chauvin was the target of violence,” said Brian Evans, spokesman for Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, in a statement to The Washington Post. “He was duly convicted of his crimes and, like any incarcerated individual, he should be able to serve his sentence without fear of retaliation or violence.”

The attack on Chauvin occurred just days after his appeal of his murder conviction was declined to be heard by the Supreme Court. Chauvin’s murder conviction came after Floyd, a black man, died on May 25, 2020, after Chauvin pressed a knee on his neck for over nine minutes on the street outside a convenience store where Floyd was suspected of trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill.

Floyd’s dying words of “I can’t breathe” were captured by bystander video and kicked off worldwide protests and riots, which marked the beginnings of the Black Lives Matter movement. 

However, Chauvin maintains Floyd’s death was accidental and not the result of suffocation, as prosecutors alleged. A recent report sparked a new interest in reviewing the case, after it indicated that Floyd had a lethal level of drugs, including fentanyl, in his system when he died.

Further, Chauvin has argued that the narrative that was promoted by many news outlets, a white officer attacking a black victim, made it impossible for him to receive a fair trial.

“Mr. Chauvin’s case shows the profound difficulties trial courts have to ensure a criminal defendant’s right to an impartial jury consistently when extreme cases arise,” Chauvin’s legal team wrote in their appeal to the Supreme Court. “This was particularly true here when the jurors themselves had a vested interest in finding Mr. Chauvin guilty in order to avoid further rioting in the community in which they lived and the possible threat of physical harm to them or their families.”

Forty-seven-year-old Chauvin was sent to the Tucson facility from a maximum-security Minnesota state prison in August 2022 to serve both a 21-year federal sentence for violating Floyd’s civil rights and a 22.5-year state sentence for second-degree murder simultaneously. 

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