What was going on with him in his final years?
Grok says:
Evan Wright, the acclaimed journalist and author of Generation Kill, took his own life on July 12, 2024, at age 59, via a gunshot wound to the head, as confirmed by the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner. Figuring out why is trickier—no suicide note’s been made public, and his family’s kept the details close. But piecing together what’s out there from his final years gives some clues about what might’ve been weighing on him.
In the lead-up to his death, Wright was deep into revisiting his teenage trauma at The Seed, a “scared straight” program in Florida he’d been sent to at 13 after getting expelled from Hawken School for selling weed (well, catnip he passed off as weed). He’d been promoting Teen Torture, Inc., a Max documentary released July 11, 2024—the day before he died—where he spoke about the abuse he endured there: sleep deprivation, public humiliation, threats, the works. On X, he posted about it a lot that last week, calling survivors “my brothers and sisters” and hinting at a lingering pain. July 10, he tweeted about still searching for a support group for “Adult Children of Alcoholic Lawyers,” a nod to his rough upbringing with lawyer parents—his dad split when he was 8, and his mom had a breakdown after a friend’s murder. His sister Nora told TheWrap he’d suffered from PTSD since those Seed days, and his nephew Jacob Goldin said he’d been “unhinged” lately, “running from something.”
Wright’s career was still humming—he’d won awards, written books like American Desperado, and worked on TV gigs like Homeland. But that last stretch was intense. He was plugging away at The Seed: A Memoir, a book he’d been wrestling with for years, maybe decades. Karl Taro Greenfeld, in an Alta piece, said Wright’s process was “tortured,” spinning wild theories about The Seed’s founders linking to Reagan’s War on Drugs or MAGA. It’s hard to tell if that was genius or a mind spiraling. His X posts mixed politics, trauma, and dark humor—active right up to July 11, when he retweeted Paris Hilton’s testimony about similar programs. Then, nothing.
What was going on? No one’s got a clean answer. PTSD from The Seed seems like a big piece—reliving it for the doc and book might’ve cracked something open. His nephew’s “not acting himself” line suggests a sharp shift, maybe despair or panic. No reports of booze or drugs in his system (the coroner didn’t release toxicology), and his wife Kelli and three kids were still in his life, though how tight things were there’s anyone’s guess. David Simon called him “feral” but charming; maybe that wild edge turned inward.
Why’d he do it? Could’ve been the weight of old wounds, stirred up fresh, with no off-ramp. Or something snapped that night—impulse, not a plan. We’re left with fragments: a guy who faced Iraq’s chaos head-on but couldn’t outrun his own.
