Former Chicago cop beaten in prison
CHICAGO — At turns tearful and defiant, the wife of former Chicago police Officer Jason Van Dyke told reporters Thursday morning how her husband was beaten in his prison cell shortly after being transferred from Illinois custody to a federal prison in Connecticut last week.
“My No. 1 fear for my husband has always been his safety, it always has been that somebody is going to get him and hurt him, and the worst has happened,” Tiffany Van Dyke said in the downtown offices of her husband’s lawyers.
The attorneys were told Feb. 5 that their client had been moved from a state correctional center to a federal prison facility in Connecticut. Two days later, shortly after he had been processed and moved into the general population, several people attacked him in his cell, lawyers Daniel Herbert and Tammy Wendt said.
“The mentality out there seems to be that people won’t rest until he is either given a life sentence or killed in prison, and that’s truly unfortunate, and it’s certainly not what this system is about,” Herbert told reporters.
It was unclear why Van Dyke was transferred out of Illinois, where he had been held since he was sentenced to 81 months in prison last month. Van Dyke was convicted in October of second-degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery in the 2014 fatal shooting of Laquan McDonald.
The former officer was held in isolation when he was in an Illinois prison, and his attorneys said they were not aware of any security threats or other incidents that would have prompted such a dramatic transfer. Illinois prison officials had declined to say where he was being held, citing concerns for his safety should his location be revealed.
On Thursday, a spokeswoman for the Illinois Department of Corrections confirmed that Van Dyke had been moved out of state custody but would not give any further information.
The federal Bureau of Prisons website lists Van Dyke as now being held at Danbury Federal Correctional Institution, a low- to minimum-security facility.
Van Dyke was put in general population, attorneys said Thursday, but moved into a segregated unit after the attack.
On Monday, the state attorney general and the special prosecutors appointed to handle the case announced they would be challenging the legal reasoning behind the sentence in the Illinois Supreme Court — a move that, if successful, could significantly lengthen the former officer’s sentence.
After his conviction but before sentencing, Van Dyke was being held in isolation at a Quad Cities-area jail. The move was part of an arrangement Cook County has with other jails to move prisoners who are either high-profile, dangerous or working as cooperating witnesses in other cases.
Van Dyke was charged with murder the same day as the court-ordered release of graphic dashboard camera footage that showed him shoot McDonald 16 times as the teen walked away from police while holding a knife in his hand.