Tory Lanez had to be airlifted to a hospital after he was stabbed by another inmate at a California prison this week, his father said Wednesday.
Speaking at a press conference, Lanez’s dad, Sonstar Peterson, said the rapper was stabbed more than a dozen times in his torso, arms and head and was being rushed to a nearby medical facility in a vehicle when a call was made to upgrade his emergency.
“I’m bleeding out here,” Lanez allegedly told his first responders, according to Peterson. His father said Lanez’s lungs had collapsed, but he didn’t know it.
“All he knows is that he couldn’t breathe. He could hardly speak. Upon which the officer turned around and looked at him and said, ‘No, we got to take him. He has to be airlifted,” Peterson told reporters, according to Fox 11.
“The report from the hospital is that he is doing remarkably well,” Peterson said Wednesday, explaining that doctors already had removed the tubes to his son’s lungs. “He is recovering remarkably.”
According to prison officials, the man suspected of stabbing Lanez is a fellow inmate serving a life sentence for second-degree murder. The suspect, identified as 42-year-old Santino Casio, was previously convicted over a separate assault with a deadly weapon while in custody, officials said. The alleged attack happened around 7:20 a.m. local time Monday at the California Correctional Institute in Tehachapi, about a hundred miles north of Los Angeles; Casio has been placed in restricted housing pending an investigation by prison officials and the Kern County District Attorney’s Office, per officials. The motive for the attack is not clear.
Lanez is serving a 10-year prison sentence after he was convicted in December 2022 of shooting Megan Thee Stallion in both feet during an alcohol-fueled curbside confrontation on July 12, 2020. At his trial, Megan gave three hours of harrowing testimony in which she recalled Peterson yelling “dance bitch” as he fired at her feet. The chief resident of orthopedic surgery at Cedars Sinai Medical Center walked jurors through X-rays showing the wounds to Megan’s feet. He said doctors identified four metallic bullet fragments embedded in her feet and removed what they could during emergency surgery. A man who witnessed the shooting testified that he saw a “very agitated” man “firing everywhere.”
On Wednesday, representatives for Lanez said they’re still working to overturn the rapper’s conviction. His legal team claimed they have a new witness who has stepped forward to say that Megan’s former best friend, Kelsey Harris, was the shooter. The new witness, a driver, allegedly said that Harris claimed, in his presence, that she personally fired the gun three times before it dropped to the ground and fired two more times, ostensibly, without anyone pulling the trigger.
At trial, Harris testified that she was present the morning of the shooting. In an 80-minute recorded statement to prosecutors played in court, she vividly recalled Peterson firing five shots, leaving Megan wounded on the ground. Once she was on the witness stand, under a subpoena from prosecutors, Harris invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and asked for blanket immunity. Prosecutors agreed to give her “use immunity” instead, meaning her sworn testimony couldn’t be used against her in a future proceeding, but she could still be charged with something based on other evidence.
On the witness stand, Harris disavowed key aspects of her recorded statement, claiming she didn’t see Peterson open fire and was operating under “assumptions” when she sent three lines of text to Megan’s bodyguard five minutes after the shooting that read: “Help / Tory shot meg / 911.”
While Harris refused to implicate Lanez in her live testimony, she said it was “ridiculous” for his defense to claim she was the shooter. She said it was true that she, Megan and Lanez were driving away from a pool party at Kylie Jenner’s house when Lanez sparked a verbal altercation inside an Escalade, leading up to the shooting. But she was adamant her subsequent estrangement from Megan wasn’t based on the fight. She said it stemmed from her belief that no one was defending her amid online accusations she shot Megan. (Harris did not immediately return Rolling Stone‘s request for comment sent Wednesday.)
In her own testimony, Megan said she was rushed into surgery with general anesthesia at a Los Angeles hospital during the height of COVID restrictions. When she woke up with stitches in her feet, she couldn’t walk.
While Megan was still in the hospital, Lanez texted her an apology that read: “Meg, I know u prolly never gone to talk to me again, but I genuinely want u to know I’m sorry from the bottom of my heart. And i was just too drunk. Nonetheless, shit should have never happened, and I can’t change what did. I just feel horrible. Cuz I genuinely just got too drunk.”
In a statement sent to Rolling Stone on Wednesday, Megan’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, dismissed the new witness who purportedly served as a driver for Harris during Lanez’s trial. “Tory Lanez was tried and convicted by a jury of his peers and his case was properly adjudicated through the court system. This is not a political matter — this is a case of a violent assault that was resolved in the court of law,” Spiro said.