Marion Christopher Barry, 36, the sole child of the late former D.C. mayor Marion Barry, is dead of a drug overdose.  He was discovered by his girlfriend, who brought him to George Washington University Hospital, where he expired.  He has no close family survivors, as his father and birth mother pre-deceased him.

With his death, a would-be Democrat political dynasty has come to an end, for Christopher Barry unsuccessfully attempted to gain election to the D.C. City Council.  His father’s enduring popularity with the capital’s electorate failed to pass on to the heir.

The arc of the story of the Barry Family Saga begins with a justifiable fight for civil rights in the South and left-wing activism as the first head of SNCC, soars to political heights as city councilman and mayor (four terms, in two separate sequences), and then, tragically (in the classical Greek sense of being undone by hubris) declines into criminality and depravity, captured on videotape in a motel room...

...smoking crack with a hooker and being arrested (“The bitch set me up,” Barry claimed), corrupt, and imprisoned.  D.C. voters forgave him after he got out of prison and elected him mayor again.

Such are the standards of civic virtue in our nation’s capital.

Most readers probably are familiar with Marion Barry’s story, but if not, the Wikipedia article on him covers most of the high points.

The story of the Barry family is very sad.  I offer condolences to Christopher Barry’s girlfriend and others who knew and will miss him.  I wonder what kind of chance he had at all.  If anything, the critical juncture in his personal story may well have been his father’s youthful embrace of leftist ideology (SNCC was very left-wing) and victimology, which led to a sense of grievance overpowering adherence to law and an embrace of pleasure in the moment over family responsibility.