Accidental drug overdose caused rock star’s death
Tom Petty, the charttopping singer and songwriter, died in October from an accidental drug overdose as a result of mixing medications that included opioids, the medical examiner-coroner for the county of Los Angeles announced Friday, ending the mystery surrounding his sudden death last year.
The coroner, Jonathan Lucas, said that Petty’s system showed traces of the drugs fentanyl, oxycodone, temazepam, alprazolam, citalopram, acetyl fentanyl and despropionyl fentanyl.
Barely a week after Petty, 66, had concluded a tour with his band, the Heartbreakers, with two shows at the Hollywood Bowl, representatives said the singer had suffered cardiac arrest at his home in Malibu on Oct. 2. But Petty’s official death certificate-listed his cause of death as “deferred” pending an autopsy.
In a statement posted to Petty’s Facebook page Friday, his wife, Dana, and daughter, Adria, wrote that Petty suffered from “many serious ailments including emphysema, knee problems and most significantly a fractured hip,” but that he continued to tour, worsening his conditions. “On the day he died he was informed his hip had graduated to a full on break and it is our feeling that the pain was simply unbearable and was the cause for his over use of medication,” the statement said.
“As a family we recognize this report may spark a further discussion on the opioid crisis and we feel that it is a healthy and necessary discussion and we hope in some way this report can save lives,” Petty’s family said. “Many people who overdose begin with a legitimate injury or simply do not understand the potency and deadly nature of these medications.”
In 2016, the pop singer Prince was found to have died from an accidental overdose of self-administered fentanyl, a synthetic opiate estimated to be more than 50 times more powerful than heroin. In 2015, federal officials said that incidents and overdoses with fentanyl were “occurring at an alarming rate throughout the United States.” Drug deaths involving fentanyl more than doubled from 2015 to 2016, according to the governmental account of nationwide drug deaths last year.