Evan Wright, the award-winning journalist who wrote about US subcultures within the e book Technology Kill, which he helped adapt into the HBO miniseries of the identical title, has died aged 59.
Wright died by suicide on Friday at a house in Los Angeles, a report by the Los Angeles County medical expert mentioned.
He appeared within the Max documentary Teen Torture, Inc, by which he spoke about his time within the Seed, a controversial “scared straight” program for kids in Florida.
In interviews through the years, Wright spoke about being despatched there after his mom’s finest pal and her husband had been murdered by their son in 1972, resulting in his mom’s breakdown. He started to behave out and was expelled from faculty aged 13 and held on drug expenses after he pretended to promote marijuana, which was really catnip. He was then despatched to the Seed.
The Seed, which acquired federal funding till 1974, was topic to a Senate report that very same yr which revealed the establishment used sleep deprivation, threats of bodily violence, public humiliation and fixed surveillance as a method controlling the kids – techniques that had been in comparison with these utilized by North Korea throughout the Korean battle. The Seed shut down in 2001.
Wright spoke about dwelling with post-traumatic stress dysfunction after his expertise there, after the socialite Paris Hilton testified earlier than a Home committee about her expertise in 4 related youth amenities.
“Every time I see victims of those applications communicate out, I all the time suppose, ‘That’s my brother or sister,’” he wrote on X the day earlier than he died. “I really feel a bond with anybody who went via this. Then I noticed Paris Hilton’s testimony and I realised, ‘Oh, shit she’s my sister, too?’ However sure, it’s a giant, tousled household of us.”
Wright ultimately returned to high school. Within the Nineties he moved from Ohio to Los Angeles to develop into a screenwriter however started working because the leisure editor and “chief pornographic movie reviewer” for Hustler journal. He quickly started writing for Rolling Stone, Time journal and Vainness Honest.
“I failed at every little thing else,” Wright as soon as mentioned of journalism. “I used to be optimistic. It was a refuge for rogues and miscreants. Up to now, it has exceeded my expectations.”
In 2003 he was despatched to Iraq by Rolling Stone and embedded with the Marines’ 1st Reconnaissance Battalion Bravo Firm. His journalism resulted within the e book Technology Kill, which he tailored into an HBO miniseries with David Simon, the creator of The Wire. Within the present Wright was performed by the actor Lee Tergesen.
“We’ve misplaced a fantastic journalist and storyteller,” Simon wrote on social media on Sunday. “Evan’s contributions to the scripting and filming of Technology Kill had been elemental. He was charming, humorous and never a little bit bit feral, as many reporters are. So many moments writing in Baltimore and on set in Africa to recollect.”
After Technology Kill, Wright continued to jot down about matters starting from environmentalists to neo-Nazis; his different books included American Desperado, concerning the mafia cocaine smuggler Jon Roberts, and The right way to Get Away with Homicide in America, a few CIA agent who turned the main focus of an FBI investigation. He additionally labored as a producer on TV reveals together with The Bridge, The Man within the Excessive Fort, Homeland and Soiled John.
Wright is survived by his spouse, Kelli, and their three youngsters.
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