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Contender contestant kills himself; Mark Burnett: “Nothing changes” with the show.

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Contender contestant kills himself; Mark Burnett: “Nothing changes” with the show.
A 23-year-old boxer who will be featured on NBC’s The Contender killed himself yesterday. With his girlfriend next to him, Najai “Nitro” Turpin “fatally shot himself in the head early yesterday while sitting in a parked car in West Philadelphia,” according to the Philadelphia Daily News.

Although Turpn is one of the 16 featured boxers on the show, Mark Burnett told the New York Times that his death doesn’t affect the series at all: “Nothing changes. I’m not even going to make any edits because it’s real.”

Turpin’s manager told the New York Daily News that Najai “had a lot of stuff on his mind. … You never really knew what was going on in Najal’s head. I know he wanted to get back to fighting. With ‘The Contenders’ thing he hadn’t fought in over a year. That bothered him, but I can’t say that was the only thing that was bothering him.”

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  • Andy Dehnart

    Andy Dehnart is the creator of reality blurred and a writer and teacher who obsessively and critically covers reality TV and unscripted entertainment, focusing on how it’s made and what it means.

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