Dad Was Beaten to Death While Protecting Son Over Schoolyard $30 Money Dispute: Fiancee
A Maryland man who stood up to bullies died after the beating they allegedly gave him after coming to his home and targeting his son.
Christopher Wright, 43, died Saturday, one day after being savagely beaten, according to a post on Facebook by the Anne Arundel County Sheriff’s Office. The sheriff’s office said it is seeking “3-4 white males, mid 20’s to mid 30’s” in connection with the attack.
Tracy Karopchinsky, Wright’s fiancee, said the attack at their home came after fights at school that began as a scuffle over $30. Wright’s son, Trenton, 14, was involved in the fights, according to the New York Post.
Christopher Wright beaten to death over $30 dispute, family suspect he was hit with blunt object https://t.co/yyPCL7y9gY pic.twitter.com/k5eiSxpA3X
— New York Post (@nypost) May 25, 2023
On Friday evening, she said five people — three boys with whom Trenton Wright had scuffled and two adults — arrived at Wright’s home and wanted to see the 14-year-old.
“Chris came out to tell them, like, he’s not coming out here to fight, and they threatened at one point to come in and get him, and then they said, ‘If he’s not going to fight, then you’re going to fight,'” Karopchinsky told WBAL-TV.
“Just looking at the damage that was done to him, that wasn’t just punching that did that. Like, there’s no way that punching did that. The damage was done before the ambulance ever took him away. I mean, he’d had a seizure. It was done. There was nothing that the hospital could do,” Karopchinsky said.
In the account she gave to the Post, Karopchinsky said the attack on Wright was “a brutal thing. It wasn’t two people fighting.”
“My son said his dad was thrown to the ground at one point. I know there was punching. My son said he was being slammed against the ground.”
She said her eldest son saw one attacker take something out of the car in which the attackers arrived.
“My son has no idea what he got out of the trunk. We don’t know if [Wright] was hit with something,” Karopchinsky said, adding, “You don’t get catastrophic brain damage from a fist fight.”
Karopchinsky said even after Wright was on the ground, “the adult was still hitting him.”
“The guy fighting him said out loud ‘Oh my God, he’s bleeding,’ handed my son his dad’s necklaces that had come off in the fight, said ‘I’m sorry’ and to call 911. Then they all ran to the SUV and left,” she said.
She said the next day, as she sat by Wright, she realized something important.
“I held his hands,” she said. “You would have bruises from punching people. His hands weren’t swollen, nothing. He did not fight back. I don’t know how quickly he was unconscious but he never defended himself.”
“The neurosurgeon came out to talk to me and explained they would do an emergency brain surgery. He had severe brain damage. The surgery lasted about three-and-a-half hours. By the time I was taken to him, his severe brain injury had turned into catastrophic brain injury. After the surgery they were doing constant CAT scans and they had stopped some bleeding in the brain, but then they saw he’d had a stroke and had bleeding from the brain stem they couldn’t do anything about.”
Karopchinsky said the rampant violence among teens has to stop, according to WBAL-TV.
“They didn’t just ruin our lives. Their lives are going to be changed forever. Their parents’ lives are going to be changed forever, and nobody thinks about that just from a fight,” she said.
Violence “is everywhere, and somewhere, we as parents are failing these children as parents. It’s not the school’s responsibility. It’s our responsibility,” she said.
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