DETROIT: Chris Cornell, a US musician, was found dead in the bathroom of his hotel in Detroit on Wednesday night, hours after the grunge band played a concert in the city. He was 52.

Police said Cornell died of hanging by suicide.

“Chris Cornell died of hanging by suicide,” a medical examiner ruled on Thursday.

Cornell’s publicist Brian Bumbery said his wife Vicky and family were shocked to learn of his sudden and unexpected passing.

Cornell, the lead singer of Soundgarden and later Audiolave, had tweeted earlier on Wednesday: “#Detroit finally back to Rock City !!!! @soundgarden.”

“What I look forward to the most -- because I tour so much, especially the last couple of years, by myself -- is the camaraderie. It’s what we missed when we weren’t a band,” Cornell had posted on Facebook on Tuesday. The band had been in the middle of a US tour.

Soundgarden was one of the leading bands in the grunge music movement in the 1980s and ‘90s, releasing albums such as Badmotorfinger and 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.

Published in Dawn, May 19th, 2017