5 апр 1994 г. - Suicide of Kurt Cobain

Описание:

Kurt Cobain, the lead singer and guitarist of the American rock band Nirvana, one of the most influential acts of the 1990s and one of the best-selling bands of all time, suffered from chronic bronchitis and intense pain throughout most of his life due to an undiagnosed chronic stomach condition. He was also prone to alcoholism, suffered from depression, and regularly used drugs and inhalants. 

On March 4th, 1994, Cobain was hospitalized in Rome following an overdose of Rohypnol (Flunitrazepam) and alcohol at The Westin Excelsior Rome. His management agency, Gold Mountain Records, said that the overdose was accidental, and that he was suffering from influenza and fatigue. However, Cobain's wife, Courtney Love, later confirmed that the overdose had been a suicide attempt:
"He took 50 pills. He probably forgot how many he took. But there was a definite suicidal urge, to be gobbling and gobbling and gobbling."
Cobain's cousin Beverly, a nurse, said that the family had a history of suicide, and that Cobain had been diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and bipolar disorder.

Cobain said that his stomach pain had been so severe during Nirvana's 1991 European tour that he became suicidal, and that taking heroin was "the only thing that's saving me from shooting myself right now." Regarding that same 1991 European tour, Cobain noted:
"Halfway through the European tour, I remember saying I'll never go on tour again until I have this fixed because I wanted to kill myself. I wanted to fucking blow my head off. I was so tired of it."

In Charles Cross's biography Heavier Than Heaven, Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic is quoted on seeing Cobain in the days before his intervention:
"He was really quiet. He was just estranged from all of his relationships. He wasn't connecting with anybody." 
Novoselic's offer to buy dinner for Cobain resulted in unintentionally driving him to score heroin: "His dealer was right there. He wanted to get fucked up into oblivion ... He wanted to die, that's what he wanted to do."  Drummer Dave Grohl reflected that by the time they recorded "You Know You're Right":
"It was not a pleasant time for the band. Kurt was unwell. Then he was well. Then he was unwell. The last year of the band was tough."

On April 1st, 1994, Cobain left Exodus Recovery Center, the Los Angeles drug rehabilitation clinic he had checked into two days before, by scaling a six-foot wall. On April 2nd, Cobain took a taxi to a Seattle gun shop, where he purchased and received a receipt for shotgun shells. Cobain told the taxi driver he wanted to buy shells because he had been burglarized.

On April 8th, Cobain's body was discovered in the greenhouse above the garage at his Lake Washington Boulevard East house by VECA Electric employee Gary T. Smith, who had arrived that morning to install security lighting. Smith initially thought Cobain was asleep until he saw blood coming out of Cobain's ear. He also found a suicide note with a pen stuck through it inside a flowerpot. A Remington Model 11 20-gauge shotgun purchased for Cobain by his friend, musician Dylan Carlson, was found on Cobain's chest. It had been legally purchased by Carlson at Stan Baker's Gun Shop in Seattle.

Cobain did not want the gun purchased in his name because he thought police might seize it for his own protection. The police had taken away his guns twice in the previous ten months. The King County Medical Examiner noted puncture wounds on the inside of both the right and left elbows. The shotgun was not checked for fingerprints until May 6th, 1994. The Seattle police report states that the shotgun was inverted on Cobain's chest with his left hand wrapped around the barrel.

On April 14th, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported that Cobain was "high on heroin when he pulled the trigger". The paper reported that the toxicological tests determined that the level of morphine in Cobain's bloodstream was 1.52 milligrams per liter and that there was evidence of Valium in his blood. The report contained a quote from Randall Baselt of the Chemical Toxicological Institute and author of all 12 editions of the common forensic toxicology textbook Disposition of Toxic Drugs and Chemicals in Man (including its chapter on heroin) which stated that Cobain's heroin level was at "a high concentration, by any account" but that the strength of the dose would depend on many factors, including how habituated Cobain was to the drug.

On April 10th, 1994, a public memorial service was held at Seattle Center, where a recording of Courtney Love reading Cobain's suicide note was played. Near the end of the vigil, Love arrived, and distributed some of his clothing to fans who remained. In the following days, Love consoled and mourned with fans who came to her house.

Cobain's body was cremated. Love divided his ashes; she kept some in a teddy bear and some in an urn. She took another portion of his ashes to the Namgyal Buddhist Monastery in Ithaca, New York. There, some of his remains were ceremonially blessed by Buddhist monks and mixed into clay, which were used to make tsatsas. A final ceremony was arranged for Cobain by his mother on May 31st, 1999, that was attended by both Love and Tracy Marander. A Buddhist monk chanted while Cobain's daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, scattered his ashes into McLane Creek in Olympia, Washington, the city where he "had found his true artistic muse".

Several of Cobain's friends were surprised by his suicide. Mark Lanegan, a long-time friend of Cobain, told Rolling Stone: "I never knew Cobain to be suicidal. I just knew he was going through a tough time." In the same article, Carlson stated that he wished Cobain or someone close to him had told him that the Rome incident was a suicide attempt.

Anthony Kiedis, lead singer of Red Hot Chili Peppers, expressed his feelings in his autobiography, Scar Tissue, writing:
"The news [of Cobain's death] sucked the air out of the entire house, I didn't feel like I felt when Hillel died; it was more like "The world just suffered a great loss." Kurt's death was unexpected ... It was an emotional blow, and we all felt it. I don't know why everyone on earth felt so close to that guy; he was beloved and endearing and inoffensive in some weird way. For all of his screaming and all of his darkness, he was just lovable."

A musical hero of Cobain's, Greg Sage, said in an interview:
"Well, I can't really speculate other than what he said to me, which was, he wasn't at all happy about it, success to him seemed like, I think, a brick wall. There was nowhere else to go but down, it was too artificial for him, and he wasn't an artificial person at all. He was actually, two weeks after he died, he was supposed to come here and he wanted to record a bunch of Leadbelly covers. It was kind of in secret, because, I mean, people would definitely not allow him to do that. You also have to wonder, he was a billion-dollar industry at the time, and if the industry had any idea at all of him wishing or wanting to get out, they couldn't have allowed that, you know, in life, because if he was just to get out of the scene, he'd be totally forgotten, but if he was to die, he'd be immortalized."

In March 2014, the Seattle Police Department (SPD) developed four rolls of film that had been left in an evidence vault. According to Seattle police, the photographs depict the scene of Cobain's corpse more clearly than previous Polaroid images taken by the police. Detective Mike Ciesynski, a cold case investigator, was asked to look at the film because "it is 20 years later and it's a high media case". Ciesynski stated that the official cause of Cobain's death remained suicide and that the images would not be released to the public; however, the images were released in 2016. According to a police spokesperson, the SPD receives at least one request weekly, mostly through Twitter, to reopen the investigation. This resulted in the maintenance of the basic incident report on file.

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