The fiancée of the Maryland father who was beaten to death outside his home last week recalled the heartbreaking moment their three sons said goodbye as he lay comatose in the hospital in a wrenching interview with The Post.
Tracy Karopchinsky, 44, said doctors from the Shock Trauma Center called her the morning after Christopher Wright’s attack to say the 43-year-old’s condition had severely worsened overnight and her family needed to get to the hospital by noon “to have a very difficult conversation.”
“I told the boys we had to go to the hospital,” she told The Post. “I let the boys go in and talk to him and tell him they loved him. He had no brain function at that point.”
“I just wanted the boys to be able to talk to him, tell him they loved him and that they’d see him later. It was tough.”
“I laid in bed with my fiancée all day on Saturday and I held his hands,” she said.
Wright died from the injuries he sustained at the hands of three teenagers and two adults who showed up at his home in Brooklyn Park on Friday afternoon wanting to fight his 14-year-old son Trenton, who had been involved in earlier altercations that day over a $30 dispute.
When Wright refused to let them touch his son, one of the men said, “If your son’s not going to fight, you’re going to fight,” and after an initial skirmish, Wright was body-slammed to the ground.
Karopchinsky said the severity of the injuries to her fiancée’s head led her to suspect he may have been struck with a blunt object during the fight.
One of her sons who witnessed the attack said he saw an assailant pull an object out of the trunk of his car before the fight broke out.
Karopchinsky said she was at work when the fight happened, and her neighbor frantically called her manager to let her know what happened.
“I came to the phone and she said, ‘Chris has been in a fight, he was beaten bad, it was really bad,’” she said. “I was having kind of a panic attack, I couldn’t breathe. I was terrified.”
Following the fight, Wright was rushed to the hospital, where Karopchinsky said they performed emergency surgery on his brain.
“He had severe brain damage,” she said. “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.”
“I went home to talk to the boys. I told them, ‘It’s very bad’. Teenage boys didn’t really understand what ‘very bad’ meant.”
Wright and Karopchinsky started dating 16 years ago, and were engaged eight years later.
They share two sons together, 11-year old Tevin and 14-year-old Trenton, and Wright was stepfather to Karopchinsky’s 16-year-old, Tryston.
Asked whether she and Wright had made any plans to officially wed, Karopchinsky lamented to The Post, “We thought we had more time.”