Mike Tyson’s daughter dies after hanging accident

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PHOENIX (AP)—The 4-year-old daughter of boxer Mike Tyson died at a hospital Tuesday, a day after her neck apparently got caught in a treadmill cord at her Phoenix home, police said.

Exodus Tyson was pronounced dead just before noon, police Sgt. Andy Hill said. She had been on life support and police have said their investigation showed her injury on Monday was a “tragic accident.”

“There are no words to describe the tragic loss of our beloved Exodus,” the family said in a statement. “We ask you now to please respect our need at this very difficult time for privacy to grieve and try to help each other heal.”

Police said Exodus either slipped or put her head in the loop of a cord hanging under the console. Her 7-year-old brother found her and told their mother. She took Exodus off the cord, called 911 and tried to revive her.

Responding officers and firefighters performed CPR as they took the girl to the hospital.

Former heavyweight champion Tyson was in Las Vegas at the time of the accident and flew Monday to Phoenix, where he was seen entering the hospital.

The family’s home is in a modest, quiet neighborhood. Neighbors say they saw Tyson there from time to time and the children played outside regularly.

Dinka Radic, who lives across the street, said Exodus would ask her if she had any chocolate. When Radic gave her some, Exodus would hug the woman’s knees and “kiss, kiss, kiss.”

“She’d say ‘hi’ to everybody. She was really friendly,” said Abdul Khalik, 53, who lives next door.

He said Exodus rode her bicycle in the neighborhood and often played with his two children and his niece. He said his 14-year-old daughter had cried all day after hearing of Exodus’ death.

Ben Brodhurst, 20, who lives across the street, said Exodus’ and her family went trick-or-treating at his house the last couple of Halloweens. She was “very lively, very enjoyable to be around,” he said.

The neighborhood contrasts starkly with the lavish lifestyle Tyson had through his tumultuous years of boxing, when he spent tens of millions of dollars and says he had millions more stolen from him by unscrupulous associates. During two years at the height of his career, he earned $140 million.

The death of his child in such an unusual accident adds an awful chapter to the boxer’s troubled life.

Tyson first began boxing in a facility for juvenile delinquents in upstate New York at the age of 12. Eight years later, he became the youngest heavyweight champion ever when he knocked out Trevor Berbick in 1986. But in 1990, he was defeated by James “Buster” Douglas in one of the biggest upsets in boxing history, and soon after was convicted of raping a beauty pageant contestant in Indianapolis.

Tyson, who still denies he raped the woman, served three years in prison.

A few years later, he served three months in jail for beating up two men after a minor car crash in suburban Washington.

As his career continued, so did his bizarre behavior. He bit off a piece of Evander Holyfield’s ear during a boxing match and once threatened to eat the children of heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis.

Although Tyson’s children had lived in their unassuming neighborhood for several years, he purchased a separate home in the tony Phoenix suburb of Paradise Valley in 2005 for $2.1 million, selling it two years later for $2.3 million.

In November 2007, Tyson spent 24 hours in Maricopa County’s “Tent City” jail after pleading guilty to one count of cocaine possession and one misdemeanor count of driving under the influence. Police found the drug when they pulled over Tyson’s car after he left a Scottsdale night club.

According to police, Tyson said after his arrest that he bought cocaine “whenever I can get my hands on it.”

At Tyson’s sentencing hearing, nearly a year after the arrest, his attorney David Chesnoff said his client had taken 29 drug tests without a relapse and was attending Alcoholic Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings.

Tyson had become an example of how one overcomes problems with drugs, a violent past and poor upbringing, Chesnoff said.

“He’s tried his hardest,” his attorney said, “despite coming from almost impossible beginnings.”

Associated Press Writers Bob Baum and Terry Tang contributed to this report.


I feel for them, I'm just irked that some piece of shit hack journalist felt it necessary to bring up all his problems in the same article as his poor daughters death.
 
Agreed. It has nothing to do with his daughter, it’s incredibly distasteful. Almost like they don’t want you to feel sorrow for him because of his past. He has a family too, and I’m sure they are all incredibly distraught over this.
 
Well, honestly, though it is in no way pertinent to the telling of this tragedy; some people might need to know why some guy is getting national attention for his daughter passing away. A lot of the people who dominate the journalism/internet (both readers and contributors) are probably of the age where when his Pay Per View fights were on... they were in bed or watching a Disney movie. The recap may have been a reminder to those readers to let them know "Hey, this guy is more than a joke appearance on a sitcom or movie". I don't know, though I do think that that information dominating the article takes away from the memory of Exodus.

My thoughts go out to the entire Tyson family.
 
That's what Google and Wikipedia are for though, I've used them when a name comes up that I don't recognise.
 
But why would they want someone to navigate away from their "online news source" or put down their magazine to go use the Googlebox? They want to have all the information readily available so you have the background. Stop using logic, then it will make sense.
 
I like logix. :( Girl dying horribly shouldn't be shadowed by her father's past because it isn't relevant, unless he had something to do with the death. He was out of town at the time it happened.

This is Fox News style reporting ._.;
 
Well, honestly, though it is in no way pertinent to the telling of this tragedy; some people might need to know why some guy is getting national attention for his daughter passing away. A lot of the people who dominate the journalism/internet (both readers and contributors) are probably of the age where when his Pay Per View fights were on... they were in bed or watching a Disney movie. The recap may have been a reminder to those readers to let them know "Hey, this guy is more than a joke appearance on a sitcom or movie".

This is the answer. One of the core tenets of journalism is that you write a story as though you're telling it to someone who has never heard any of the details or of any of the parties involved before, which is why you'd say why any of this being written down at all. Tyson's history is the only thing that makes his daughter's death of note to anyone outside his immediate circle. Without the fame the most print this would have generated is two or three paragraphs buried on the inside pages of some Arizona newspapers looking for filler. Cold, but true.

Since the story follows the Inverted Pyramid (another core tenet of the craft) it includes a number of obvious, easy cutoff points for newsprint, depending on ad space and editorial prerogatives about how many of the details are really needed. Most newspapers and magazines would have used one of them, but since the story was taken from an online source you get the whole package. Like it or not, it's Journalism 101.
 
I think that it’s bad journalism personally. Trailing of the actual story with sensationalism just to make the story more “interesting”. Yes, you’re told in school that you have to explain to the reader like they’ve never heard of any of the factors before. If the actual story isn’t “interesting” enough without adding out of context fodder, don’t write the story at all.
 
It's not bad journalism. It's proper journalism. Tyson's biography is why it's newsworthy in the first place. His parenthood is the context. Lots of kids die in accidents every day and get nothing but local coverage. Without the Tyson connection, at best the story is one of those "odd" briefs they send about people who die in fun ways like drowning in chocolate vats or getting their skulls crushed when the MRI machine turns on and the magnet jerks a loose oxygen tank into the chamber.

Like Neyla pointed out, all of that stuff is at the end. Most people only read a few paragraphs before moving on to the next story. That's why we have the inverted pyramid in the first place. You get the important stuff up front where it's likely to be read. Everything after that is gravy.

I was putting together the next morning's sports pages when the story came over the wire. We used it as a brief -- just three or four paragraphs at the bottom of a page -- because there was plenty of more important sports news taking up the space. If it'd been a slow news day, we might've run more of it with a photo of Tyson.

From an editorial standpoint, I'd always rather have the full story so I can use what I need.
 
I don’t really think “proper” journalism is rehashing (see: copy/paste) old stories for sensationalism. His little girl was killed, if people don’t know who Tyson is then all they need is a brief overview. They don’t need a laundry list of ‘horrible’ things Tyson did during his life, they aren’t relevant to the story at all. That over-shadow’s the actual story of daughter’s death, which is what the article is supposed to be about. Otherwise it might as well just have been named “Here’s why Mike Tyson is a bad person, btw his daughter got killed recently”.

I get that some people only read the first bit of an article, but that doesn’t mean the rest of the article isn’t as important as the beginning.
 
Mike Tyson's relation to the child is the story. It's the primary reason the story exists and that much is said in the opening sentence. Dead children are a dime a dozen and most of them never see their names in print outside of their obituaries. Dead children with celebrity parents are another matter altogether.

It's like expecting a story about Ted Kennedy's slow decay from brain cancer to never mention his living in the shadows of two slain brothers or the drunken clusterfuck that was Chappequiddick. Never going to happen. They're defining moments in his public life. Same goes for Tyson's follies. He's better known for the rape and spousal abuse than he is for his brief reign in what was already a near dead sport.

And unless you're working on a lengthy human interest piece, the end of an article is never as important as the beginning. That's the point of the inverted pyramid. New angle and information up front. Minor, excludable details in the back.
 
Mike Tyson's relation to the child is the story. It's the primary reason the story exists and that much is said in the opening sentence. Dead children are a dime a dozen and most of them never see their names in print outside of their obituaries. Dead children with celebrity parents are another matter altogether.

If the actual story isn’t “interesting” enough without adding out of context fodder, don’t write the story at all.

I totally understand what you're getting at. I'm just saying that when it's written in this way, it almost seems like they're using his daughters death as an excuse to bring up points of his life that have been discussed at nauseam.
 
I'll agree with you that the level of detail the writer went with was excessive. If it had been me I would have summed up his fame (or infamy) in two or three sentences and left it at that, right at the end. The boxing title. Holyfield's ear. The rape conviction. That much you have to go with when it comes to a Tyson story. The rest of it, not so much. The story could easily be summed up at half its length, which is why there are built-in cut-offs via the pyramid Halifirien and I have mentioned.
 
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