DAWSON — For a man who needed 20 pints of blood to save his life after being shot six times, Christopher Wright seemed awfully spry and even matter-of-fact.
Dressed in a shiny suit, Wright stood happily in the lobby of Johnson & Son Funeral Service, the tiny mortuary where he's an apprentice. After six weeks of recuperation, Wright was bored of sitting in semi-seclusion, so he called his mentor, Ernest Johnson, and asked to come pick him up.
Annie Jackson walked into the lobby to visit a dearly departed and was tickled to see Wright upright and smiling. It was God’s will he’s still here, she gushed as Wright nodded in agreement.
“I’m trying to take back control of my life,” he said.
And residents of this tiny, decaying farm community 170 miles southwest of Atlanta are still trying to make sense of one of the most bizarre stories in recent memory.
Last year, the then 22-year-old made news by perhaps becoming the state’s youngest mayor, defeating a man who had been in office as long as Wright had been alive. This year, Wright made news when a gunman took his mother hostage, lured him home with a text message and ambushed him when he returned.
The Halloween night attack has divided this town, generating political debate, gossip and flat-out conspiracy theory as to why this happened.
“I don’t know why, of course, it’s an ongoing investigation,” Wright said. “If I had to guess, I’d say it was an attack on my life politically.”
The GBI has not made an arrest in the case and the City Council has twice declined to give the recovering mayor round-the-clock police protection, citing the cost (an estimated $14,600 a month) and asserting the shooting was not government related.
“We don’t think it was politically motivated,” said Councilman Calvin Stephens, who was in the 4-2 majority to not give Wright a full-time guard. “If they want to kill you, they shoot you in the head. He got it here (Stephens pointed to his legs and lower body.) They were sending him a message.”
The night before visiting the funeral home, Wright sat in his kitchen and displayed the carnage to his body. He pulled up his shirt to show the scars in his abdomen from three bullet holes and an exit wound in his side. There are another two in his thigh and one in his arm. A maze of ugly, long surgical scars traverse his body from below his breastbone to his knee.
“I was shot at close range, that’s why it didn’t do as much damage,” he said. Dawson’s police chief believes the shots were .38-caliber bullets.
A Halloween ambush
On Halloween night, the electricity went out in his mother’s small brick public housing unit. Tonya Johnson Wright went to the door to see what was up and was overpowered by at least two men. (The GBI, who took over the investigation, is talking very little and Wright said, “Some things I will talk about. Some things I won’t talk about.”)
“They tied her up (with his ties) and asked where I was and when I was coming home,” said Wright. “They texted me (on her phone) and said to come home.”
Wright was in a meeting at a Waffle House in Albany, about 20 miles to the southeast, and was driven home after he got the text. He said he was walking to the house when “someone rushed out the side door. One person shot four times and I fell to the ground. Someone stood over me and shot twice.
“I called 911, laying out there with my face in the dirt, my teeth in the dirt, my clothes saturated with blood,” he said. A neighbor who is a minister prayed over him until the ambulance came.
“It is very bizarre,” said the young mayor of the episode, “very bizarre.”
That is an understatement.
Wright’s chauffeur the night he was shot was Charlie Whitehead, the city’s longtime police chief.
“He said he was going to a meeting and wanted someone from the police department to be with him,” said Whitehead. The chief said he “didn’t get involved in the conversation” at the diner. “I just got some food,” he said.
“I drove him back to the front of his house,” said Whitehead. “Then I drove about five blocks and that’s when he called me saying he was shot.”
Councilman Artie Gardner has supported Wright in several controversial votes on the council. Gardner, who was a police chief himself in a neighboring town until the entire force was disbanded this year, chuckled when asked about the Waffle House gathering. “I have my own opinion on that,” he said, before pausing and adding. “It’s strange.”
Terrell’s troubled history
Wright got interested in politics at an early age, getting schooled by local NAACP leader Ezekiel Holley and his boss, funeral director Johnson, who is also a Terrell County commissioner.
Holley said he brought a teenaged Wright to several civil rights demonstrations and told him of the region’s dark past. The county was nicknamed Terrible Terrell for brutal treatment of African Americans in the early 1960s. And in 1976 a white ranch foreman was shot to death in a small grocery near Dawson and five young black men were arrested. The case catapulted into the national spotlight partly because Jimmy Carter, who was elected president that year, came from nearby Plains. The so-called Dawson Five were eventually released after a judge threw out a confession said to be coerced, killing the prosecution.
Holley, like many others here, worries a political conspiracy is involved in Wright’s shooting. Conspiracies are deep-rooted in Dawson. In 1994, Holley’s NAACP predecessor, James Barnes, who crusaded on behalf of the Dawson Five, was found beaten to death in his office. The killing led to speculation that he died because he bucked an entrenched white power structure. But the conviction of a black man on robbery and murder charges never really dissuaded some from that theory.
Being mayor of Dawson is a rough job. The town has 4,500 residents, down 10 percent in the past decade. About 80 percent are black, almost half its residents fall under the poverty line and as many as one in four are out of work.
Jerome Johnson, the mayor’s uncle, described the sense of emptiness in a region where cotton and peanut fields dominate the landscape: “The shirt factory went out; the boat factory went out; the sewing factory went out; the rubber factory went out.”
“We don’t have no jobs; we need something,” continued his wife, Thelma, standing near Lee Street downtown. “Look at all these old buildings here. They’re empty.”
A young mayor stirs controversy
That sense of despair helped Wright defeat former Mayor Robert Albritten, who owns a funeral home, one of three black funeral homes in town, all owned by politicians.
Holley said that Wright, an Albany Technical College grad who hopes to go into the funeral business, is one of Dawson’s “young bloods,” someone who “will lead the city to either prosperity or to doom.”
Yet Wright’s election clearly ruffled feathers.
Council member Stephens, a retired English teacher from Terrell County High School, taught Wright not long ago and thought he was a clever, dedicated student. But as mayor, Stephens said Wright has shown his age.
“At 23, there’s a lot you don’t know,” he said. Stephens and other city officials complain Wright came in trying to make abrupt changes, trying to pull authority from other officials, fire people and pushing to establish an “event center” downtown that sometimes acts as a nightclub.
“I tell you something, he woke up this town,” said Stephens. “A lot of people are concerned about our image.”
The question of detailing a body guard for the mayor from the city’s 20-0fficer force is just the latest issue to divide the population.
Shay Jones, a 29-year-old walking downtown, doesn’t think Wright warrants protection. She, like many others, believes he is not telling investigators all he knows. “He knows who did that to him,” she said.
Van Phillips, a former county commissioner and Dawson hardware store owner, believes it is just one more embarrassment for the long-beleaguered burg. He dismisses the “political hit” theory as ludicrous.
“It seems unusual there would be a hit on someone in a little small town,” said Phillips, standing near a mounted deer head in his store. “What do you have to gain by knocking off someone like that? I honestly believe something else is involved.”
Stories are rampant the mayor owned someone money and was shot for not paying it back.
Wright has heard that one. “They are saying all kinds of things, that I was a drug dealer,” he said. “I have been more than cooperative (with investigators), have turned over my personal cell phone and my city cell phone.”
Chief Whitehead told the council recently he has undertaken a plan to keep an eye Wright without creating a separate detail.
Wright said he will soon return to office. One day, he believes the whole episode will be behind him, and “this is all something I can tell my children.”
He smilled and paused.
“I don’t have any, by the way.”
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