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Soundgarden's Chris Cornell had sounded groggy, was slurring his words and protested, "I am just tired", in a phone call to his wife just before he was found unconscious in his hotel room.
It was Vicky Cornell who sounded the alarm after speaking to Cornell on his return to his hotel room from his Detroit concert on Wednesday, according to a police report and family statement obtained by The Detroit News.
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Following the strange conversation, she asked the band's bodyguard to check on Cornell. The bodyguard busted into the room and discovered the frontman lying on the bathroom floor, said the police report into his death.
The bodyguard, Martin Kirsten, had earlier helped fix the star's computer and given Cornell two doses of an anti-anxiety medicine, after he had return to the hotel following the Fox Theatre concert, the report said.
Chris Cornell was one of grunge's 'big four' voices - and now only one remains. Photo: supplied
Filed by officers from the Detroit Police Gaming Unit who responded to the scene, the police report said Cornell had walked off stage with his bandmates at 11:15pm.
At 11:35 pm, Cornwell was on the phone with his wife. Worried, she called the bodyguard shortly after midnight.
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The Wayne County Medical Examiner has ruled the cause of death to be suicide. Vicky Cornell and her lawyer Kirk Pasich have called for the release of the toxicology tests to be sure what happened to the frontman.
"The family believes that if Chris took his life, he did not know what he was doing, and that drugs or other substances may have affected his actions," Pasich said.
Cornell performs on stage at the Soundwave hard rock and heavy metal music festival at the Melbourne Showgrounds in 2015.
Photo: Paul Rovere
In the family statement, Vicky Cornell said she spoken to her husband before and after the concert and noticed during the later conversation that, "he was different". He had repeated: "I'm just tired."
"When he told me he may have taken an extra Ativan or two, I contacted security and asked that they check on him," the wife was quoted.
According to the police report, Kirsten gave Cornell two Ativan pills, "which victim takes for anxiety".
As a leading band in the American grunge music movement, Soundgarden had found mainstream success with the Grammy-winning fourth album, Superunknown.
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