Thursday (April 19) saw the release of a series of investigative materials, including documents, photos and videos, related to the death of beloved American singer-songwriter Prince. According to these files, various confidants of the late pop legend had been growing increasingly alarmed throughout the weak before he died, especially as they tried to find him help for his apparent opioid addiction.
However, none of the documents were able to provide the crucial information of who exactly provided the fentanyl, a synthetic opioid considered 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine, which ended up becoming Prince’s reaper.
“My focus was lasered in on trying to find out who provided that fentanyl, and we just don’t know where he got it,” said Carver County Attorney Mark Metz. “We may never know. … It’s pretty clear from the evidence that he did not know, and the people around him didn’t know, that he was taking fentanyl.”
With prosecutors having announced that no criminal charges are planned to be filed and that the state investigation was finally closed, the documents were free to be released to the public, just ahead of the two-year anniversary of Prince’s death.
To wind the tape back to April of 2016, Prince was just 57 when his body was found at his widely known Paisley Park studio compound. Some of the newly released images show how the superstar was lying on his back, alone and unresponsive in the elevator. He had head on the floor, eyes closed, right hand over his stomach and left arm next to him. Soon after the discovery, a joint investigation between Carver County and federal authorities was launched, along with a national outpouring of grief.
Other than various photos and videos, the documents include interviews with Prince’s inner circle, most importantly, his longtime friend and bodyguard Kirk Johnson. In his correspondence with the investigators, he says that he had noticed Prince had begun to look “just a little frail.”
However, it was not until Prince had actually passed out on a plane, a mere week before his death, that Johnson found out about the singer’s opioid addiction. A couple weeks prior to the collapse, however Johnson already had his suspicions.
“It started to all making sense though, just his behavior sometimes and change of mood and I’m like oh this is what, I think this is what’s going on, that’s why I took the initiative and said let’s go to my doctor because you haven’t been to the doctor, let’s check it all out,” said Johnson. He followed through by asking his doctor, Michael Todd Schulenberg, to see the troubled superstar on April 7.
According to Schulenberg himself, he gave Prince an IV, and prescribed vitamin D and a nausea medication under Johnson’s name. Johnson then called Schulenberg again a week later, and asked the doctor to prescribe regular pain medication for Prince’s hip, to which Schulenberg complied, again under Johnson’s name. On the night of April 14 to April 15, Prince passed out on a flight home from Atlanta, after which the private jet made an emergency stop in Illinois. In order to revive the musician from his state, he had to be given two doses of a drug that reportedly reverses the effects of opioid overdose.
Johnson then contacted Schulenberg again just three days later on April 18, asking for assistance as Prince was struggling with opioids, at which point Johnson reportedly apologized to the doctor for asking him to prescribe the previous painkiller, which was supposed to be just for his hip. That same day, Schulenberg had an appointment with Prince, where he ran several tests (including a urinalysis which came back positive for opioids) and prescribed a variety of other medications.
In order to receive more specialized help regarding Prince’s opioid problem, Paisley Park staffers reportedly contacted the California addiction specialist Howard Kornfeld. His son, Andrew, was sent to Minnesota that night, and unfortunately later bore witness to Prince’s body. The younger Kornfeld told investigators that Prince was “still warm to the touch” when he was found, but that rigor mortis had begun to set in.
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