Journalist whose book about US marines in Iraq was adapted into acclaimed HBO series killed himself on Friday

Evan Wright, the award-winning journalist who wrote about US subcultures in the book Generation Kill, which he helped adapt into the HBO miniseries of the same name, has died aged 59.

Wright died by suicide on Friday at a home in Los Angeles, a report by the Los Angeles County medical examiner said.

He appeared in the Max documentary Teen Torture, Inc, in which he spoke about his time in the Seed, a controversial “scared straight” program for children in Florida.

In interviews over the years, Wright spoke about being sent there after his mother’s best friend and her husband were murdered by their son in 1972, leading to his mother’s breakdown. He began to act out and was expelled from school aged 13 and held on drug charges after he pretended to sell marijuana, which was actually catnip. He was then sent to the Seed.

  • jimmydoreisalefty@lemmy.world
    194·
    4 months ago

    Journalist whose book about US marines in Iraq was adapted into acclaimed HBO series killed himself on Friday

    “Whenever I see victims of these programs speak out, I always think, ‘That’s my brother or sister,’” he wrote on X the day before he died. “I feel a bond with anyone who went through this. Then I saw Paris Hilton’s testimony and I realised, ‘Oh, shit she’s my sister, too?’ But yes, it’s a big, messed up family of us.”

    “I failed at everything else,” Wright once said of journalism. “I was optimistic. It was a refuge for rogues and miscreants. So far, it has exceeded my expectations.”

    In 2003 he was sent to Iraq by Rolling Stone and embedded with the Marines’ 1st Reconnaissance Battalion Bravo Company. His journalism resulted in the book Generation Kill, which he adapted into an HBO miniseries with David Simon, the creator of The Wire. In the show Wright was played by the actor Lee Tergesen.