Former Yankees Player Arrested for Beating Up Ex-Wife for Writing Check

Fallen New York Yankee hero Jim Leyritz was busted early Thursday on charges of beating up his ex-wife.

Leyritz went ballistic and dragged Karrie Leyritz out of bed and socked her twice because she'd written a check without his permission, police said.

She fled to a neighbor's house and called the cops, who found her bleeding from a cut above one eye - and streaks of blood on the walls of the couple's home in Davie, Fla.

It wasn't immediately clear where Leyritz was when cops arrived, but when he was arrested later he claimed his ex was drunk and hurt herself to frame him.

Karrie Leyritz was angry because he had tried to evict her from the house they still share, the slugger claimed.

When cops later questioned their three kids, who slept through the incident, one told police his mother was drunk and most likely hit herself, the Sun-Sentinel newspaper in Ft. Lauderdale reported.

This arrest comes two months before Leyritz is to stand trial on charges of causing a fatal crash while driving drunk in December 2007.

In a May interview with the Miami Herald, Leyritz said he's tormented by the accusations he killed Fredia Ann Veitch - and insisted he wasn't a drunk.

"There was no possibility of me avoiding that crash with all of my senses," Leyritz said.

"A mother was taken away from her kids. I can't change that," Leyritz said. "But I didn't do it. The accident did. And that accident wasn't my fault."

The paper reported that Leyritz spends his days surrounded by bulging case files and revisiting the scene of the crash - an obsession his lawyer called "unhealthy."

"To listen to people who don't know the facts hurts, but I can't help it," Leyritz said. "I listen. I can't tell you how many times I go away, sit in my backyard and just break down and cry. People are so wrong about who I am."

Leyritz and Veitch were drunk when, cops say, he blew through a light and hit her car after a night of partying with a centerfold model.

As an accused drunken driver, Leyritz must take periodic drug tests and breathe into a Breathalyzer to start his car. He was briefly in a psych ward this year after friends called cops to say he sounded distraught.


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