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How did Aaron Carter die?
Aaron Carter
December 7, 1987 — November 5, 2022
Lancaster, California
Aaron Carter died on November 5, 2022 in Lancaster, California, aged 34. The official cause of death was Drowning, with the effects of difluoroethane and alprazolam. Readers have raised 2 theories about how it happened.
Aaron Charles Carter was born in Tampa, the younger brother of a Backstreet Boy, and had a platinum album and a tour with Britney Spears before he was thirteen. He was thirty-four when he was found in the bathtub of his house in Lancaster, in the high desert north of Los Angeles, by a housekeeper.
"Aaron's Party (Come Get It)" sold three million copies to kids who are now in their thirties and still know every word. He was on Lizzie McGuire. Then he was eighteen and the child-star money was gone, and the next sixteen years were a public record of what happens to someone who was famous at nine and had nothing in place for after: bankruptcy, rehab, a reality show about rehab, a feud with his brother that played out on Twitter, an album that was better than people expected, and a son, Prince, born in 2021 to his fiancée Melanie Martin.
He was candid about all of it, often in livestreams at hours that worried the people watching. He is survived by Prince, by his mother, and by his siblings, including his twin sister, Angel.
Photos with Aaron
If you met him, this is where that photo goes. No one has added one yet.
The record
What is established, from the authorities and the people who were there.
Official cause: Drowning, with the effects of difluoroethane and alprazolam. Accident. (Los Angeles County coroner, April 2023)
On the morning of November 5, 2022, a housekeeper found him unresponsive in the bathtub of his home in Lancaster, California. Deputies and paramedics pronounced him dead at the scene. He was 34. Investigators found compressed-air cans and prescription pills in the house.
The Los Angeles County coroner's report, released in April 2023, ruled the death an accidental drowning: he had become incapacitated in the bath by the combined effects of difluoroethane, a propellant gas found in compressed-air dusters that is inhaled for a brief high, and alprazolam, a benzodiazepine, and had slipped under the water.
He had spoken publicly for years about inhalant use, had been in treatment more than once, and had recently said he was sober. His fiancée and his family accepted the finding. Melanie Martin later sued the people she said had supplied him, alleging they had provided drugs knowing his history.
What happened
The cause of death has been confirmed. The theories below are how readers understand it, and what people thought before it was known. Everyone here is anonymous.
He drowned in his own bathtub after inhaling a gas from a can of computer duster, on top of a prescription sedative. He had told the world for years that this was his problem. Was there a version of that morning where someone stops it?
The page creator
- Confirmed50 of 53 readers find this likely
He passed out in the bath from inhalant and a sedative, and drowned
The coroner's finding. Inhaled difluoroethane produces a few minutes of heavy intoxication; alprazolam makes it deeper and longer. In a bath, a few minutes of unconsciousness is enough. There is nothing else in the record. It is the kind of death that is only mysterious if you haven't seen it before, and people who work in addiction have seen it many times.
Anonymous. Says they are an addiction nurse.
Confirmed by the Los Angeles County coroner, April 2023.
- Also raised36 of 43 readers find this likely
A relapse, in a man who'd just said he was sober and was alone in a house in the desert
He'd been public about recovery weeks earlier. Relapse after a stretch of sobriety is the most dangerous kind, and inhalants are the relapse that doesn't require a dealer. Lancaster is an hour from anyone. The cause is the coroner's; the setting is the point.
Anonymous.
- Also raised24 of 38 readers find this likely
Someone kept supplying him knowing what it would do
His fiancée's lawsuit says exactly this: that people around him provided drugs with full knowledge of his history. Whether a civil court agrees is separate from the cause of death, which no one disputes. It's here because it's the question his family actually asked.
Anonymous.
The confirmed cause carries this mark and stays at the top. Theories can still be added; they sort below it.
Difluoroethane is the propellant in canned "air" sold to clean keyboards. Inhaled, it causes a short, intense intoxication, and it can cause sudden cardiac arrest or, as here, incapacitation at a moment when being incapacitated is fatal. It is cheap, legal, and sold everywhere, which is why it is a drug of last resort for people in recovery and why it is so hard for families to keep away.
Drowning in a bath after sedation is a known and under-counted way that people die of substances that are not, by themselves, at lethal levels. The water does what the drug didn't. "Accident" is the only honest manner here, and it is also the word that lets everything around it go unexamined.
Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner, report released April 2023 Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department statements, November 2022 Melanie Martin's civil complaint, 2023 Wikipedia, "Aaron Carter"
Questions people ask
- What was Aaron Carter's cause of death?
- The official cause of death was Drowning, with the effects of difluoroethane and alprazolam.
- When did Aaron Carter die?
- Aaron died on November 5, 2022, at the age of 34, in Lancaster, California.
- What happened to Aaron Carter?
- 3 theories have been raised on this page and ranked by readers. The cause is settled; the theories are about understanding how it happened.
- Who else died in 2022?
- See everyone on Ohbit who died in 2022. Aaron was 34.
Add a theory
Say what you think happened and why. You’re anonymous. If you have a reason to know (you were there, you do this for a living), you can say so.