By Nate Gartrell
The Mercury News
SAN QUENTIN, Calif. — A validated member of a white supremacist prison gang allegedly attacked a guard on San Quentin’s death row Thursday, using a homemade weapon to slash at the corrections officer’s throat, authorities said.
Todd “Stomper” Givens, 51, allegedly reached through the food port of his prison cell with the weapon, and attempted to stab the guard’s neck. The guard grabbed the weapon and was cut on his hand.
The guard was received five stitches in his hand, but did not suffer life threatening injuries, authorities said. He had been transferred from another facility to work at San Quentin during the COVID-19 crisis there, which includes more than 1,200 positive tests and 11 deaths.
A California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation news release describes the weapon as “two razor blades and a sharpened, broken piece of nail clippers attached to it.”
Givens — convicted of a double murder in Tulare County and sentenced to death in 2004 — is a validated member of the Nazi Low Riders, a prison gang with ties to the Aryan Brotherhood. The gang started in the California Youth Authority system in the 1970s, and has hundreds of members and associates, mostly in the state prison system.
Givens was convicted of murdering Barry Scott Holstone, 30, of Earlimart, and his sister, Patreace Holstone, 32, of Porterville in 1997. The siblings’ bodies were found in a burning car at an olive orchard a short distance from Givens’ home at the time.
During trial, prosecutors alleged that Givens committed the double murder based on the belief that Barry Holstone had stolen from him. Givens’ wife was convicted of helping her husband’s dispose of the victims’ bodies. While Givens awaited trial, three knives were found in his Tulare County jail cell, according to published reports.
A 2016 column by Visalia Delta Times editor Jim Houck noted that during the court process, Givens displayed a prominent ode to his neo-Nazi gang: a tattoo of Adolf Hitler on the back of his shaved head.
“Every time Givens would nod or squint, Adolf’s mustache would twitch,” Houck wrote.
This is not the first time Givens been publicly linked to a prison stabbing: In 2006, he and two other San Quentin inmates were accused of stabbing Curtis Price, an Aryan Brotherhood member also convicted of a double murder and sentenced to death.
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