He was just days into a trip to one of the world’s poorest countries, but it already changed the life of a longtime Atlanta resident. Christopher Brett Wolf didn’t want this trip to Cambodia to be his last. Sadly, his body had other plans.
“He was an old soul, and his body wore out on him,” Cammie Rice, Wolf’s mother, said Friday.
Just days after arriving in Cambodia, Wolf died after a short illness. Early Feb. 26, Rice found her son on the bathroom floor of the hotel room they shared. Wolf, 32, was unable to be revived.
Wolf and Rice had traveled to Cambodia to visit the Rice Academy, a school for 200 impoverished children the family founded in 2014. While there, the two spent time with two doctors from Emory University, who planned to return in May with students for eight weeks. When the doctors asked whether Wolf wanted to join the group, he immediately said yes.
“I want to work on the Emory team this summer, and then go back to Emory and get a Ph.d.,” Wolf told his mother.
When a sudden illness forced her son to stay in the hotel room one day, Rice worried Wolf may have gotten food poisoning. She gave him fluids and encouraged him to rest. Early the next morning, she found him unresponsive on the bathroom floor.
Wolf’s health problems began when he was 13 and growing up in Suwanee. Diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, he would have his colon removed during his senior year at Collins Hill High School, Rice said.
After high school, Wolf earned a degree in finance at Augusta State University. But working a corporate business job wasn’t what he was called to do, he told his family. Wolf was currently working on master’s degree in social work at the University of Central Florida.
Read more on Christopher Wolf's death in Cambodia at www.myajc.com.
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