Aaron Carter rose to fame in the 1990s as a teenage pop star, but he struggled with substance abuse and drug addiction from an early age, which ultimately led to his death on November 5, 2022.
Paparazzo Presents/Wikimedia CommonsAaron Carter was just 34 years old when he died in November 2022.
There was perhaps no person who better defined 2000s pop stardom than Aaron Carter. From hits like “How I Beat Shaq” and “Aaron’s Party” to his collaboration with the Baha Men, Carter’s music was a staple for teens of the early aughts. Every public pool, grocery store, and radio station in America seemed to be playing his hits. However, the singer also dealt with addiction and substance abuse from a young age, and that unfortunate struggle led to Aaron Carter’s death in 2022.
That November, 34-year-old Carter drowned in his bathtub while under the influence of inhalants and benzodiazepines. By the time his housekeeper found him, it was too late to resuscitate him.
Tragically, what happened to Aaron Carter wasn’t the only such death that occurred in the singer’s immediate family. Two of his sisters also died from suspected overdoses, Leslie in 2012 and Bobbie Jean in 2023.
While Carter’s death wasn’t entirely unexpected by his loved ones — “I knew this day would come,” his sister Angel once said — it shocked fans around the world who remembered him as the preteen pop star they’d grown up with.
Aaron Carter’s Early Life And Rise To Stardom
Aaron Carter’s talent was clear from a young age. His first introduction to the celebrity lifestyle came in the 1990s when his older brother, Nick Carter, became a teen idol as a member of the Backstreet Boys. When Aaron was only nine years old, he opened for the band in Berlin, which led to his own record deal. His debut album was released in December 1997, just before his 10th birthday, but it was his second album, Aaron’s Party (Come Get It), that skyrocketed him to fame in 2000.
Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix / Alamy Stock PhotoAaron Carter first rose to fame when he was just nine years old.
Songs like “I Want Candy” and “That’s How I Beat Shaq” became instant hits, and soon 12-year-old Carter was opening for Britney Spears and guest starring on Nickelodeon and Disney television shows. He even appeared on Broadway in the musical Seussical in 2001. By 2002, Carter had released two more albums, one of which went platinum.
However, it was also around this time that things began to take a downward turn in Aaron Carter’s personal life. In 2002, his parents filed a lawsuit against his former manager, Lou Pearlman. They claimed that Pearlman had failed to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties from Carter’s debut album. Then, in 2004, Carter’s parents divorced. The young singer reportedly found out about their separation just one hour before he filmed an episode of MTV Cribs.
Nick Carter/InstagramNick and Aaron Carter as children.
This was only the beginning of Carter’s strained relationship with his mother and father. When he turned 18 in 2005, he allegedly learned that his parents had illegally used the money he made as a minor to purchase cars and houses for themselves, leaving only a fraction of his earnings in his Coogan account.
Carter also had troubled relationships with his siblings. After his sister Leslie died in 2012, he claimed that she had sexually abused him when they were children. Carter also leveled similar accusations against his brother Nick, suggesting that he’d abused another family member. Nick denied these allegations.
This turbulent childhood set the stage for a lifetime of addiction — and the ultimate death of Aaron Carter.
The Substance Abuse That Led To Aaron Carter’s Death
Aaron Carter himself stated that it was his parents’ separation that sparked his struggles with mental health and substance abuse. “The depression was brought on because I loved my family being together,” the singer told Oprah in 2016. “I did not want to see them divorced. I couldn’t dwell on it. I couldn’t think about it too much. I kind of had to block it out. I started partying and getting into a lot of trouble.”
Peter Dzubay/Wikimedia CommonsAaron Carter performing at the Gramercy Theatre in 2014.
Carter largely fell out of the public eye by the mid-2000s. He released a fifth album that was made up of his previous hits in 2003, and he briefly starred in a reality show called House of Carters with his siblings in 2006. The singer returned to television in 2009 to appear on Dancing with the Stars, but after that, he didn’t make any major career moves until 2013. That year, he went on tour for the first time in nearly a decade, playing 150 shows in the U.S. and Canada.
By 2017, it was clear to the public that Aaron Carter was struggling with something. After his father died that May, the 29-year-old singer was arrested for driving under the influence and possession of marijuana. Then, in September, the police were called to his home in Florida four times over a two-day period due to concerns for his safety. Carter had reportedly crashed his car, was abusing drugs and alcohol, and was threatening to harm himself and others.
He checked into rehab later that month. His representative told Us Weekly at the time, “Aaron has decided to enter a facility to improve his health and work on his overall wellness. He is going to do this privately and focus all his attention on being the best person and performer possible. He is grateful for the support and love from his fans and looks forward to coming back stronger than ever before.”
Image Press Agency / Alamy Stock PhotoAaron Carter’s fans were concerned by his gaunt appearance in 2017.
Tragically, he never had the chance to make this comeback.
A year after Aaron Carter’s death, his sister Angel told PEOPLE that the death of their father was “the beginning of the end.”
“Aaron was already in a bad place,” she said, “but it was like a domino effect.” Carter was reportedly diagnosed with schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder while in rehab, and by 2019, his decline was becoming more and more obvious to both his loved ones and his fans. He live-streamed himself on social media often, sometimes showing his gun to the camera. He claimed that his family members were plotting to kill him. He was paranoid. He covered his face in tattoos. He looked skinny and ill.
YouTubeAaron Carter shared a series of troubling livestreams on his social media pages in the months before his death.
“He wanted so badly to be happy,” Angel told PEOPLE. “He really fought to the end, but he just had too many problems to be fixed. He’d become this person who we no longer recognized. I don’t even think he recognized himself.”
Ultimately, what happened to Aaron Carter in November 2022 was the culmination of these addictions, mental health battles, and childhood traumas that many people saw coming — but nobody was able to prevent.
How Did Aaron Carter Die?
On Nov. 4, 2022, the police visited Aaron Carter’s Los Angeles home to perform a welfare check after he was seen on Instagram Live seemingly huffing air duster. The singer asked them to leave, but later that day, he missed an appointment with his drug counselor. When his housekeeper arrived at 11 a.m. on Nov. 5, she walked into a grisly sight.
Aaron Carter/InstagramA screenshot from Aaron Carter’s final post on Instagram just one week before his death.
Carter was unresponsive in his bathtub. Emergency responders rushed to the house, but the 34-year-old singer was pronounced dead at the scene.
An investigation soon revealed how Aaron Carter died. He had inhaled difluoroethane, a gas commonly used as a propellant in air duster sprays, and taken alprazolam, the generic form of Xanax. According to his autopsy report, he’d become “incapacitated while in the bathtub” and drowned while under the influence of these drugs. The police also reportedly found prescription bottles and cans of air duster in Carter’s home.
While Aaron Carter’s cause of death was officially ruled an accident, his fiancee and the mother of his one-year-old son, Melanie Martin, wasn’t convinced. She told TMZ in 2023, “It claims death is by drowning but also adds he was wearing a t-shirt and necklace in the bathtub which doesn’t make sense, why would he be in a bathtub with clothes on? I am still in shock and miss Aaron every day. I don’t understand the chain of events and this report only has us asking more questions.”
In the aftermath of the tragedy, Nick Carter wrote on Instagram, “My heart has been broken today. Even though my brother and I have had a complicated relationship, my love for him has never ever faded. I always held onto the hope that he would somehow, someday want to walk a healthy path and eventually find the help that he so desperately needed… [T]he truth is that addiction and mental illness is the real villain here.”
Aaron Carter/XAaron Carter with his dog in October 2022.
In March 2023, the Carter siblings’ mother, Jane Schneck, made the bizarre decision to release photos of the scene of Aaron Carter’s death, along with claims that he had been receiving threats that were ignored by the authorities. In response, Angel called the post “a true invasion of privacy and something that Aaron would’ve never wanted the public to see.” She added that their childhood “was filled with emotional abuse, dysfunction, and addiction” and that she has been striving to break that generational cycle.
“It’s much easier to raise a strong child than to fix a broken adult,” Angel said. “Something positive has to come from all this. I refuse to allow Aaron to have died in vain. I want Aaron’s legacy to be more than those final years of his life.”
After learning how Aaron Carter died, read about Stevie Ray Vaughn’s death and the helicopter accident that caused it. Or, read about the shocking death of rising NFL star Sean Taylor.
