A federal prisoner was charged on Friday with attempted murder in the brutal prison stabbing of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer convicted of killing George Floyd.
Prosecutors say John Turscak, 52, stabbed Chauvin 22 times in the law library at the Tucson Federal Correctional Institution in Arizona with an improvised knife.
Turscak was charged with attempted murder, assault with the intent to commit murder, assault with a dangerous weapon, and assault resulting in bodily injury.
Turscak told correctional officers that he would have killed Chauvin had they not responded so quickly. Officers used pepper spray to subdue Turscak.
Turscak would later tell FBI agents that he attacked Chauvin on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, because it ws was symbolic with the Black Lives Matter movement and the “Black Hand” symbol associated with the Mexican mafia gang, the complaint says.
Turscak told the agents that he had been thinking about attacking Chauvin for about a month because of Chauvin’s notoriety but denied wanting to kill him, the complaint says.
The attack on Chauvin happened about 12:30 p.m. on Nov. 24 inside the facility’s law library.
Turscak attacked Chauvin with an “improvised knife” with the “intent to do bodily harm” and to “commit murder,” according to the criminal complaint.
Turscak was sentenced to 30-year in prison for crimes he committed while working as an FBI informant.
Chauvin suffered serious injuries in the attack and was listed in stable condition Saturday.
Just days before the attack, the U.S. Supreme Court denied Chauvin’s appeal of his state conviction of second-degree murder.
Chauvin is serving a 20-year federal prison sentence for violating Floyd’s civil rights.
Who is John Turscak?
According to NPR, “Turscak led a faction of the Mexican Mafia in the Los Angeles area in the late 1990s, going by the nickname ‘Stranger,’ according to court records. He became an FBI informant in 1997, providing information about the gang and recordings of conversations he had with other Mexican Mafia members and associates.”
Prison records show that John Turscak is a 52-year-old white male, set to be released 6/3/2026.
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