Aaron Carter may have characterized 2000s pop fame more than anyone else. Carter’s music was a mainstay for teenagers in the early 2000s, with successes including “How I Beat Shaq” and “Aaron’s Party” as well as collaborations with the Baha Men. Every public pool, grocery store, and radio station in America seemed to be playing his tunes. However, the singer struggled with addiction and drug abuse from an early age, which ultimately led to Aaron Carter’s death in 2022.
Carter, 34, drowned in his bathtub in November after using inhalants and benzodiazepines. By the time his housekeeper discovered him, it was too late to revive him.
Tragically, Aaron Carter’s death was not the only one in the singer’s close family. Two of his sisters died of suspected overdoses: Leslie in 2012 and Bobbie Jean in 2023.
While Carter’s death was not wholly unexpected for his loved ones — “I knew this day would come,” his sister Angel once remarked — it startled fans all across the globe who remembered him as the teenage pop sensation they had grown up with.
Aaron Carter’s Early Years And Rise To Stardom
Aaron Carter’s brilliance was obvious from an early age. His first encounter with the celebrity lifestyle occurred in the 1990s, when his elder brother, Nick Carter, became a teen superstar as a member of the Backstreet Boys. When Aaron was nine years old, he opened for the band in Berlin, which led to his own record contract. His first album was published in December 1997, just before his tenth birthday, but it was his second album, Aaron’s Party (Come Get It), that catapulted him to popularity in 2000.
Songs like “I Want Candy” and “That’s How I Beat Shaq” went viral, and Carter, 12, was soon opening for Britney Spears and guest appearing on Nickelodeon and Disney television series. In 2001, he made his Broadway debut with the musical Seussical. By 2002, Carter had published two additional albums, one of which was certified platinum.
However, it was also during this time that Aaron Carter’s personal life started to go poorly. In 2002, his parents sued his former manager, Lou Pearlman. They alleged that Pearlman neglected to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties for Carter’s first record. Then, in 2004, Carter’s parents split. The young artist learned of their split only one hour before filming an episode of MTV Cribs.
This was merely the start of Carter’s troubled relationship with his mother and father. When he reached 18, he reportedly discovered that his parents had unlawfully used the money he earned as a juvenile to buy vehicles and residences for themselves, leaving just a portion of his earnings in his Coogan account.
Carter has rocky connections with his siblings. After his sister Leslie died in 2012, he claimed she sexually molested him as a youngster. Carter made similar charges against his brother Nick, alleging that he had mistreated another family member. Nick refuted the charges.
This traumatic upbringing paved the way for Aaron Carter’s lifelong addiction and eventual death.
The Substance Abuse That Caused Aaron Carter’s Death
Aaron Carter indicated that his difficulties with mental health and drug misuse stemmed from his parents’ split. “The depression was brought on because I loved my family being together,” the singer said to 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.”
By the mid-2000s, Carter had mostly disappeared from the public spotlight. In 2003, he released a fifth album comprised of his past singles, and in 2006, he appeared briefly on the reality program House of Carters with his siblings. The singer returned to television in 2009 to perform on Dancing with the Stars, although he did not make any significant professional changes until 2013. That year, he went on tour for the first time in over a decade, doing 150 gigs throughout the United States and Canada.
By 2017, the public knew Aaron Carter was battling with something. After his father died in May, the 29-year-old musician was arrested for driving under the influence and possessing marijuana. Then, in September, police were summoned to his Florida home four times in two days out of concern for his safety. Carter allegedly smashed his vehicle, was using drugs and alcohol, and threatened to hurt himself and others.
He entered treatment later that month. His publicist informed 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.”
Unfortunately, he never had the opportunity to make this return.
A year after Aaron Carter died, his sister Angel told PEOPLE that their father’s death was “the beginning of the end.”
“Aaron was already in a bad place,” she said, “but it was like a domino effect.” By 2019, his deterioration was becoming more apparent to both his loved ones and fans. He often live-streamed himself on social media, sometimes exposing his pistol to the camera. He said that his family was planning to murder him. He was paranoid. He tattooed his whole face. He seemed thin and unwell.
“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.”
Finally, what occurred to Aaron Carter in November 2022 was the result of years of addiction, mental health struggles, and childhood traumas that many people predicted but no one could prevent.
How Did Aaron Carter Die?
On November 4, 2022, police arrived at Aaron Carter’s Los Angeles house to do a welfare check after he was seen on Instagram Live reportedly sniffing an air duster. The musician requested that they leave, but later that day, he skipped a meeting with his drug counselor. When his housekeeper came at 11 a.m. on November 5, she was met with a terrible scene.
Carter was unconscious in the bathtub. Emergency personnel went to the home, but the 34-year-old singer was declared dead on the spot.
An inquiry quickly showed how Aaron Carter died. He breathed difluoroethane, a gas often used as a propellant in air duster sprays, and took alprazolam, a generic version of Xanax. His postmortem report said that he became “incapacitated while in the bathtub” and drowned while under the influence of these narcotics. According to reports, cops discovered prescription bottles and air duster cans at Carter’s residence.
Melanie Martin, Aaron Carter’s girlfriend and the mother of his one-year-old boy, was not persuaded that his death was accidental. 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.”
Following the incident, Nick Carter said 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.”
Jane Schneck, the Carter brothers’ mother, took the unusual decision in March 2023 to publicize images of Aaron Carter’s death scene, as well as reports that he had received threats that the police disregarded. In reaction, Angel described the post as “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.”
