It paints a picture of an artist who was headed for stardom, but who was also taking a variety of drugs and struggling with depression, anxiety and career pressures, all of which he talked about openly. This story is the result of more than two dozen interviews with friends, family and collaborators, as well as a review of police, autopsy, toxicology and EMT reports and thousands of text messages.
But something he took contained so much that he ended up with more than twice the lethal dose in his system. Peep almost certainly didn’t realize he was taking fentanyl, which is deadly in even minuscule quantities. His death, the Tucson Police Department concluded, was an accident.
Peep often spilled his darkest thoughts into his music, lacing his songs with lyrics like “I don’t want to die alone right now, but I admit I do sometimes.” But there is no indication he intended to die alone that afternoon. “At home, he didn’t do drugs like this,” she says. Womack has spent the long months since Peep died trying to make sense of it. The toxicology report found extremely high levels of both substances in Peep’s system, along with cocaine, marijuana and a slew of opiates. Lil Peep’s autopsy ruled that his death was an accident caused by a combination of fentanyl and Xanax. “I had three days off for grief and then went back to work because somebody has to pay the rent,” she says. Womack, who separated from Peep’s father in 2012, lives here with Peep’s brother, Oskar, who’s two years older than Peep.
On the table and counter in her kitchen, stacks of police reports, autopsy summaries and newspaper clippings mix with grocery lists and homework assignments from students in the elementary-school class she teaches. The smell of fresh-baked cookies wafts from the oven, and a small dog named Taz is a hyperactive presence, barking fitfully. Womack, an intense, fiercely intelligent woman with long gray hair that makes her look more than a little like Patti Smith, lives in a small white house, barely set back from the road in Huntington, New York. On a frigid December evening more than a year later, Liza Womack sits at her kitchen table with the wreckage of her son’s death scattered all around. Less than 30 minutes later, he nodded off and never woke up again. “Not every day is a good day, but today is. At one point, Peep looked out the bus window at the clear late-afternoon Arizona sky. The three talked video games, clothes, music Peep even said he’d consider hiring one of them as a personal assistant. “He probably had one more record before he hit critical mass,” says Wentz.Īlthough life on the road wore him down, Peep seemed genuinely happy to connect with Dowd and Bons that day in Tucson. In the two years since he began releasing music, Peep had scored a Top 40 album, walked as a runway model at Fashion Week in Milan and Paris, and collected close to 2 million followers on Instagram, where he posted photos and videos of himself drinking, smoking, getting tattoos and chopping up cocaine. Peep’s music, says Wentz, “unapologetically traversed genres in a weird way that my generation and generations older than me probably would’ve been too cautious about.” “He had this vulnerability to him, in the same way that Kurt did,” says Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz. Peep idolized Kurt Cobain, and it was easy to imagine him turning into a Kurt-like figure himself: an achingly pretty, blithely self-destructive superstar that a generation of kids could look to and see their pain reflected back at them. For a 21-year-old who’d only started posting his songs online two years earlier, it had been a head-spinning rise. The shows had been going well - most dates sold out, with mobs of kids trying to get close to Peep. Peep’s tour bus had already crossed North America twice in six weeks, and the Tucson show was to be the tour’s second-to-last stop. “He was the guy who spoke for me, things I could never put into words,” Dowd says. Between him and the fans was a plastic table scattered with lighters, pens, rolling papers, scissors, ground-up bits of marijuana and a black sticker with the phrase alive + well on it.įor then-16-year-old Nick Dowd, a massive Peep fan who’d come to the venue with his friend Mariah Bons, sitting on the bus with Peep was a dream come true.
In the back lounge, the AC was cranked, and Peep, wearing a black, studded vest and multicolored checkered pants, had folded his long, lean frame onto an upholstered seat. This was Tucson, Arizona, in November 2017, and the afternoon heat hovered in the mid-80s. They were smoking dabs, high-potency doses of concentrated weed that are vaporized, then inhaled. It was five hours before showtime and Lil Peep was in the back of his tour bus, getting high with two young fans.
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