A Texas man with a criminal record stretching back more than two decades has been arrested on charges of abusing human remains after allegedly removing a body from a local cemetery — the latest and perhaps most disturbing chapter in a long, troubled history that includes ramming a pickup truck into a Dallas television station while screaming about high treason.
Michael Chadwick Fry, 34, of Denton County, was taken into custody by Bartonville Police on a warrant served in the 500 block of Oakwood Drive. FBI special agents and task force officers assisted in the arrest. Investigators say Fry unlawfully removed and abused human remains from a local cemetery. The investigation remains ongoing, and the full circumstances surrounding what was taken — and why — have not yet been publicly disclosed.
A Record That Speaks for Itself
Fry’s arrest is shocking on its face. But for those who have followed his trajectory through Denton County courts, it’s also, in a grim way, not entirely surprising. Court records show he has accumulated more than two dozen arrests since 2003, spanning charges that include assault causing bodily injury, burglary of a habitation, terroristic threats, multiple instances of public intoxication, criminal mischief, theft of property, and resisting arrest. That’s a lot of ground to cover in roughly twenty years.
Still, nothing in that file quite prepared observers for the morning of the FOX4 incident. Before dawn on that day in Dallas, Fry allegedly drove a rented Dodge Ram pickup truck repeatedly into the side wall of the local FOX4 news station, around 6 a.m., while shouting “High treason! High treason!” He was charged with criminal mischief and held on a $25,000 bond.
A Grievance Years in the Making
So what, exactly, was he trying to say? Fry ranted that someone had been trying to kill him and referenced a past incident involving a relative. But the emotional core of his outburst appeared to trace back more than a decade — to a 2012 Denton County officer-involved shooting in which his friend, Roberto Carlos Hernandez, was killed after ramming a deputy’s cruiser during a pursuit. Fry himself was arrested at the time for a probation violation connected to the incident, according to FOX4.
Hernandez’s mother, Silvia, has a very different view of who bears responsibility for her son’s fate. She doesn’t mince words. “He’s crazy. His mind is not right,” she said of Fry. “I feel horrible for him mentioning my son’s name or doing anything in my son’s name. All I want is my son to rest in peace.” That last line lands differently now, given the cemetery charges.
Fry, for his part, framed the truck-ramming as a desperate act of a desperate man. “I’m not smart enough, I’m not powerful enough, I don’t have enough money. I’m mentally challenged,” he told reporters afterward. “I tried to do what I could to demand questions, to be heard.”
From a TV Station Wall to a Cemetery
That’s the catch. It’s one thing to view Fry through the lens of a man in crisis — someone who feels unheard, powerless, and perhaps genuinely unwell. His own words suggest he’s aware of his limitations. But the charges now pending against him aren’t about a dramatic public outburst. They involve the alleged desecration of the dead. The FBI’s involvement in his arrest hints that authorities may be treating this with considerable seriousness, though the charges as filed remain at the state level.
Bartonville Police have said little beyond confirming the arrest and the nature of the charge: abuse of a corpse. The investigation is active. There’s no word yet on which cemetery was involved, whose remains may have been disturbed, or what Fry’s alleged motive might have been. Those are questions that investigators — and, one imagines, a number of grieving families — are urgently trying to answer.
Silvia just wanted her son to rest in peace. Whether anyone in Fry’s orbit ever gets that kind of peace is, at this point, an open question.
