Music producer Mickey “Memphitz” Wright, Jr. shared a dark part of his past on a recent episode of WE-TV’s Marriage Bootcamp.
In a part of the episode where each cast member was asked to share a traumatic experience from their lives, Memphitz dropped a bombshell.
The Memphis native told the story of how his father was murdered in 2001 at the hands of a racist police officer who was also found to be a Ku Klux Klan member.
When the on-camera psychiatrist asked Memphitz to act out his anger, this happened.
“I already come up in a racist town, so it’s like for a racist KKK member to kill my dad, I have a fuse so short, it’s not good,” he said on the show.
VIBE reports:
Dale V. Mardis, a white gun dealer and auto sales owner, killed Mickey Sr. in what the Department of Justice classified as a “racially motivated” slaying.
Mickey Sr. was dismembered with pieces of his body burned in a 55-gallon drum, while remaining body parts were placed in various junkyard cars and crushed.
It took three years for Mardis to be arrested for Mickey Sr.’s murder. He pleaded no contest to the charges.
Mardis was initially offered a plea deal to serve 15 years, but a federal civil rights trialput him behind bars for life, in 2011.
“This defendant committed a heinous act of hate-filled violence, and today’s life sentence sends an unmistakable message that such conduct will not be tolerated in our society,” Thomas E. Perez, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, said of the sentence. “I am hopeful that this sentence will bring some sense of justice for Mickey Wright’s loved ones.”
Mardis also admitted to the 1998 unrelated murder of a white man over a debt dispute.
You can watch the entire show here.
