‘I can’t breathe!’: Police officer jailed for killing George Floyd stabbed inside prison
Disgraced officer attached to the Minneapolis police department, in the United States, Mr. Derek Chauvin jailed for killing an African-American man, George Floyd which sparked off a wave of worldwide protests under the hashtag; ‘Black Lives Matter,’ was reportedly stabbed in prison, Friday.
Derek Chauvin
Chauvin was convicted last June of murder and is currently serving over 22 years in state prison for his role in the gruesome murder of Mr Floyd back in 2020.
In December, last year, he pleaded guilty to federal charges of violating Floyd’s civil rights, averting a second trial.
Chauvin was caught on camera kneeling on the 46-year-old man’s neck for more than nine minutes on a Minneapolis street despite the dying man’s pleas of ‘I can’t breathe.’
Floyd’s cries of “I can’t breathe” later became a rallying call for demonstrators domestically and abroad who took to the streets in the killing’s aftermath.
The US Federal Bureau of Prisons confirmed an assault to an unnamed man without naming the person wounded.
“An incarcerated individual was assaulted at the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Tucson,” in the southwestern state of Arizona, it said in a statement.
“Responding employees initiated life-saving measures for one incarcerated individual,” the statement said, adding that the wounded individual was sent to a local hospital “for further treatment and evaluation.”
Chauvin, however, survived the attack, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons report.
Late George Floyd
It would be recalled that Chauvin was found guilty of second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in 2021, and sentenced to 22 and a half years in prison.
The incident was caught on video, providing a drastically different version of events than the initial police news release, which simply stated “officers were able to get the suspect into handcuffs and noted he appeared to be suffering medical distress.”
A Justice Department probe into the Minneapolis police, the findings of which were published in June 2023, said that officers in the department routinely resorted to violent and racist practices, “including unjustified deadly force.”
The city of Minneapolis, in the state of Minnesota, also settled a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the Floyd family, agreeing to pay his relatives $27 million.
Police officers; Thao, 36, and Kueng, 28, and a third officer, Thomas K Lane, 39, all of whom were also present during the murder, were charged with showing “deliberate indifference to [Mr Floyd’s] serious medical needs”.
Lane was sentenced in July to two-and-a-half years in prison. First at the scene with Chauvin, he held Mr Floyd’s legs as he gasped for air.
Tou Thao and J Alexander Kueng who reportedly assisted in the fatal arrest of George Floyd in May 2020, have since been sentenced on federal civil rights charges.
J Alexander Kueng and Tou Thao were convicted in February 2023 of violating the unarmed black man’s civil rights by failing to provide care or intervene.
Kueng will spend three years behind bars, while Thao was sentenced to 42 months.
For nine minutes, while lead officer Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck, Kueng held his feet while Thao held back bystanders.
Footage from the incident shows him asking Chauvin twice if Floyd should be rolled onto his side so he could breathe. Chauvin was a field training officer to both Lane and Kueng.
Neither Lane nor Kueng spoke at their sentencing hearings, but in a statement to the court in July, Thao insisted he had been “born again” after he was jailed over Floyd’s murder.
“When I walked into that jail cell, I grabbed a Bible, and I searched for it, I searched for an answer to all this wickedness, and I couldn’t find it,” he said.
