There are still missing pieces about the death of late legend Prince, but new reports have surfaced that paint a sad picture of a man struggling with opiate addiction.
The New York Time reports that warrants and affidavits from the ongoing investigation into Prince’s death were unsealed on Monday. And, while the documents don’t reveal how or where the musician got the fatal dose of fentanyl that killed him, they do reveal that Prince had a “sizable amount” of narcotic painkillers he did not have a prescription for, many hidden in vitamin and aspirin bottles.
The documents also show that some of the prescriptions where issued in the name of a close friend. In at least one instance Kirk Johnson, a friend and employee since the 1980s, was identified. Johnson was also the person who found Prince dead in the elevator of his home on April 21, 2016.
Investigators are trying to figure out to what extant Johnson helped Prince conceal his addiction. The doctor who treated Prince for hip pain in the weeks before his death, Dr. Michael T. Schulenberg, revealed to investigators that he’d prescribed the singer oxycodone on April 14, but put the prescription in Johnson’s name for privacy.
The singer’s oxycodone prescription was filled the same day his plane had to make an emergency landing in Illinois. At the time Johnson revealed to doctors that the singer might have taken Percocet on the plane.
Investigators have interviewed a number of other people who knew Prince including Andrew Kornfeld, son of Dr. Howard Kornfeld, the opioid addiction specialist Prince had been seeing, and singer Judith Hill.
The investigation into the singer’s death is ongoing.