How did Jerome Young aka New Jack die? Controversial wrestler known for bloodshed in the ring dies at 58
Wrestling legend Jerome Young, who was known in the ring as New Jack, died at the age of 58. His wife Jennifer Young confirmed the news about his death. Young suffered a heart attack in his North Carolina home where he had spent the last couple of years. Along with his wife, Jack is survived by his five children. Details about all of them remain sparse, barring drag queen Washington Heights.
She is a drag queen who openly spoke about being disowned by her famous father sometime in 2017. She tweeted about it last September, explaining that the man who brought a trash can filled with weapons in the wrestling ring didn't want the world to know his child was a drag queen. Washington Heights took to Twitter again after her father's death but none of them were about Jack's death.
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My dad (New Jack from ECW) cut me out of his life 3 years ago because he didn’t want his fans to know I’m a drag queen, and he didn’t want Wikipedia posting anything about me.
— A$AP WA$HY (@washyheights) August 31, 2020
Clearly he doesn’t know how Wikipedia works. Anywho, I’m now an official editor for Wikipedia. 😬 pic.twitter.com/iAaMk2svVN
New Jack's controversial wrestling career
Jack was known as one of the most violent men in wrestling. One of the most blood-curdling events involving him is the time he tackled Erich Kulas during an Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW) show in 1996. New Jack wrestled Kulas mercilessly and also used multiple weapons including a cheese grater, a plastic garbage barrel and a crutch. He then cut his own forehead so deep that it started to bleed and Kulas is said to have been so terrified that he passed out almost immediately.
Jack continued to batter Kulas, who was still a teenager, at one point yelling, "I don't care if the m**********r dies!" He was then tried on two charges of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, and was acquitted by a jury. Mid-nineties to the early 2000s was a golden period in the ring for Jack. He was the best at the ECW, a now-defunct promotion that positioned itself as a bloodier alternative to the WWF and WCW.
Jack was famous for bringing trash cans full of weapons to the wrestling ring, wearing a staple gun around his neck and using it on the foreheads of his opponents during matches, for balcony-diving from the second and third floor on prone wrestlers. Jack had spent many nights behind bars for intentionally causing harm to wrestlers during matches, sometimes even stabbing them.
Jack was born in Greensboro, North Carolina. He was in his late twenties when he started training. He was already making a living as a bounty hunter in Georgia, a job he absolutely loved. After the ECW became defunct, Jack went to work with a number of independent promotions. Many of them were attempting to recreate the grittiness of the ECW and in one of the matches for Los Angeles-based Xtreme Pro Wrestling, Jack faced Vic Grimes. The two men had faced each other in the past and Grimes had landed on Jack's head, blinding him in one eye.
This time around, Jack threw him from the scaffold and Grimes missed the tables that had been set up in the ring and landed hard on the ropes, injuring himself. “That was payback,” Jack said in an interview. “Was it his fault that I got hurt? Yeah. (In the original scaffold match,) he didn’t want to go with me when I said go. So I thought this is get-back," he added.