Taylor Hawkins, the Foo Fighters drummer, had ten substances in his system when he was found dead in a Bogota hotel room on Friday, officials in Colombia have said.
Hawkins, 50, died at the Four Seasons Casa Medina after complaining of chest pains. The band were due to perform hours later at Colombia’s Estéreo Picnic festival, the latest stop on their South American tour. An emergency team sent to the hotel found Hawkins unresponsive and could not revive him. His death was confirmed by Colombian officials and the band on Saturday.
A toxicologist found traces of marijuana, opioids, tricyclic antidepressants and benzodiazepines in Hawkins’s urine. The Colombian magazine Semana claimed he had suffered a cardiac arrest after an overdose of heroin and antidepressants and that his heart had weighed 600g at autopsy, twice the average for a man his age.
News of his death prompted an outpouring of grief from fans and musicians worldwide. Foo Fighters, led by the former Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl, have sold tens of millions of albums and won multiple awards since forming in 1994. Hawkins joined the band in 1997 and was revered as one the finest rock drummers in the world.
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Fans gathered outside the Four Seasons in Bogota through the weekend to lay flowers, light candles and play Foo Fighters songs. The band, who had been due to play the Lollapalooza Festival in Brazil on Sunday night and the Grammy awards next week, have cancelled the tour and returned to the US yesterday. Grohl, who lost his Nirvana bandmate Kurt Cobain to suicide in 1994 and has spoken of Hawkins as the “love of my life”, was seen in tears as he embraced friends upon arrival in Los Angeles.
Hawkins, a married father of three, had a history of drug abuse but had said recently that he was clean. He suffered a heroin overdose in London in 2001 that left him in a coma for days as Grohl sat by his hospital bed.
“Everyone has their own path and I took it too far. I was partying in London one night, and I mistakenly did something and it changed everything. I believed the bullshit myth of live hard and fast, die young,” he said in an interview last year. “I’m not here to preach about not doing drugs, because I loved doing drugs, but I just got out of control for a while and it almost got me.”
Tributes have poured in from across the music world. Brian May, the guitarist with Queen, who inspired Hawkins to take up music when his mother took him to a concert in 1982, wrote on Instagram: “Heartbroken. Taylor, you were family to us. Our friend, our brother, our beloved child. Bless you. We will miss you so bad.”
