Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell died of hanging by suicide, the Wayne County Medical Examiner’s Office said on Thursday (May 16).
Cornell, 52, was found dead in his Detroit hotel bathroom on Wednesday (May 15) night after playing a concert in the city with the grunge band.
Cornell’s publicist Brian Bumbery said earlier that the singer’s death was “sudden and unexpected.”
Detroit police spokesman Dan Donakowski said that officers were called to Cornell’s hotel around midnight by a friend of the musician and found Cornell “laying in his bathroom, unresponsive and he had passed away.”
Cornell, the lead singer of Soundgarden and later Audioslave, had tweeted earlier on Wednesday: “#Detroit finally back to Rock City !!!! @soundgarden.”
Soundgarden was one of the leading bands in the grunge music movement in the 1980s and ’90s, releasing albums such as “Badmotorfinger” and the Grammy-winning “Superunknown,” which brought the band mainstream music scene success.
Cornell had spoken openly in interviews of his struggles with drugs as a teenager, and later with alcohol. But he said in 2007 that he had been sober since checking himself into rehab in 2002. He also spoke of periods of depression and agoraphobia.
Cornell also had an extensive solo career as a singer, guitarist, composer and lyricist and worked with various other musicians over three decades in the music business.
