by Cedric ‘BIG CED’ Thornton
April 19, 2026
He is suing after being stabbed 16 times in May 2025 at the California Correctional Institution in Tehachapi.
Daystar Peterson, known to the world as Tory Lanez, has filed a lawsuit against the California Department of Corrections after being violently stabbed by another inmate last year, leaving him hospitalized.
According to The Associated Press, the recording artist is suing the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and the warden and guards at the California Correctional Institution in Tehachapi for $100 million in damages after being attacked on May 12, 2025. He said that he should not have been housed with the man who stabbed him 16 times last year.
The lawsuit accuses inmate Santino Casio of using a “shank” to attack Lanez when he stabbed him in the back, torso, head, and face in an “unprovoked life-threatening attack.” Lanez suffered a collapsed lung in the assault and had to be airlifted to a hospital.
“The choice to house Casio with Peterson was known or should have been a known danger,” according to the lawsuit. It alleges that the response from correctional officers was slow, and they took no special measures, such as flash grenades or smoke bombs, to stop Casio. The paperwork suggests that the institution should not have housed the men together because of the rapper’s “high-profile celebrity status,” which made him a target.
Casio is serving a life sentence after being convicted of second-degree murder and first-degree attempted murder. The prisoner also had another 2008 conviction for assault by a prisoner with a deadly weapon and an additional one in 2018 for manufacturing a deadly weapon.
Lanez has since been transferred to another prison, the California Men’s Colony, in San Luis Obispo County. The lawsuit also says the prison system unlawfully seized his songbooks containing unpublished lyrics of great future commercial value and has refused to return them.
Lanez is currently serving a 10-year prison sentence for shooting fellow artist Megan Thee Stallion in the foot during a July 12, 2020, incident in Los Angeles. On Dec. 23, 2022, he was convicted on three felony counts: assault with a semiautomatic firearm, carrying a loaded and unregistered firearm in a vehicle, and discharging a firearm with gross negligence.
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