Brad Delp: Details Emerge About His Tragic Suicide

The parked car was unattended, but to the police who arrived at Brad Delp’s home on March 9, it was immediately clear that something was amiss.

A dryer vent hose connected to the car’s exhaust pipe lay on the ground alongside the vehicle. Inside the garage, a note taped to the house door made the owner’s intentions explicit:

“To whoever finds this I have hopefully committed suicide. Plan B was to asphyxiate myself in my car.”

The police had been called to the Boston lead singer’s home in Atkinson, New Hampshire, by his fiancée, Pamela Sullivan, after she’d discovered Delp’s car with the dryer hose attached. Delp “had been depressed for some time,” Sullivan told the police, “feeling emotional [and] bad about himself.”

Inside the house, on a door at the top of the stairs, the police found a second note directing them to the master bedroom. Cautiously they made their way inside and into the master bedroom. There, like a portent, a third note warned them of the possible presence of deadly carbon monoxide.

Outside the bathroom of the master bedroom, a faint smell of burnt charcoal hovered in the air. The police knocked on the bathroom door. “Mr. Delp?” they called. “Sir, are you inside? Are you okay, sir?”

After a lengthy silence, they turned their shoulders to the door and began battering it with their full force. As it gave, the odor of charcoal intensified and hot plumes of blue-grey smoke poured from the excavated room. Broken tape along the door indicated it had been sealed. The police waited for the smoke to abate, then entered the room, covering their mouths and waving away the haze.