A jailhouse suicide
By Christopher FailleKirk Wright killed himself Saturday morning in his cell in the South Fulton Municipal Regional Jail, in Union City, Georgia.
This comes as something of a shock. HedgeWorld has followed the story of Mr. Wright’s legal travails since his once high-flying asset management firm, International Management Associates LLC, seemed to dissolve overnightin February 2006. It offered the usual satisfaction of such stories – the chance to play armchair Sherlock Holmes, and then the opportunity to follow the work of the real-life investigators as they unraveled what had happened.
The unraveling will continue. The consequences of IMA’s self-destruction include a lawsuit by veterans of the National Football League against the NFL and its players’ association. That action will proceed unaffected by the end of Mr. Wright’s personal story.
But the manner of his death is sobering, and gives us an opportunity to reflect that a human being who has been tempted by the possibility of easy money, who has succumbed to that temptation, and who was subject to punishment for that fall, was nonetheless … a human being. His clay was our clay, his failings are our common failings, and our world is the lesser for his passage.
We’re told that inmates who have recently been convicted are routinely put on a “security alert” where they’re watched for signs of suicidal reaction, then on a “suicide alert” is such signs are detected. Mr. Wright, then, would have been on security alert at the least, because he had been convicted Wednesday.
There should and will be an investigation, but at this point there is no reason to fault the facility or its officers. Fault may lie nowhere more specific than in what the ancients called “the tearfulness of things.”
June 3rd, 2008 at 11:16 pm
As to playing Sherlock Holmes, it obviously is not difficult to commit fraud on a grand scale when there is no legal requirment for transparency or fiduciary responsibility. It is troubling to think to what extent it is still going on.