Prince's sudden death after a visit to my infamous hometown

I don’t like to talk very much about my hometown, Rock Island, Ill. My house was shot up there as I was writing about missing persons. I sold my home and fled to Denver, where I became homeless after suffering years of psychological abuse in Illinois. Colorado helped me pick up the pieces, and I’m grateful.

In my hometown, most of the local news outlets do not rock the boat. You don’t see much investigative reporting there. The media is expected to turn a blind eye to any sort of controversy.

Legendary superstar Prince had an untimely visit to my hometown just days before he perished. There, he landed at Quad-City International Airport in Moline, Ill, which borders Rock Island. It’s not clear whether he saw a doctor at the Moline or Rock Island Trinity locations, but he received a prescription for Percocet from a Walgreens.

Turns out, prince received Percocet laced with fentanyl, according to authorities. Authorities never definitively traced the drugs found at Paisley Park to those he obtained in Moline or any other location. Prince died nine years ago April 21.All quiet in Moline, Ill.

“In Moline, few answers on Prince’s emergency landing,” read the headline atop the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Prince’s hometown newspaper. “What happened to Prince here in a middle-of-the-night medical emergency landing just days before he died? Did it prefigure his subsequent collapse inside Paisley Park? Those questions have made this city the unlikely center of a mystery riveting the world's attention.”

Indeed. Prince’s estate ended up suing the Quad-City area hospital and a Walgreens. Both settled with the superstar’s family. “Prince's heirs have sued Walgreens and the Illinois hospital that treated the music superstar after he suffered from an opioid overdose, alleging that a doctor and various pharmacists failed to provide Prince with reasonable care, contributing to his death,” the Associated Press reported. “The wrongful-death lawsuit filed in Cook County, Illinois, alleges a doctor and pharmacist at Trinity Medical Center in Moline, Illinois, failed to appropriately treat and investigate Prince's April 15, 2016, overdose, and that he died ‘as a direct and proximate cause of one or more ... deviations from the standards of care.’”

Wrongful death lawsuit dismissed

In January 2020, the Associated Press offered this update. “A wrongful death lawsuit filed by Prince’s family members has been quietly dismissed in recent months, suggesting family members have reached settlements with defendants including the Minnesota doctor who saw Prince in the weeks before his death and the Illinois hospital that treated him for an opioid overdose seven days before he died.”

The entire thing is weird. I remember when I was in high school and working at one of the local newspapers, I expressed my fondness for Prince’s music aloud in the newsroom. One of my editors was appalled and made it clear she didn’t care for him.

No foul play

Initially, lawyers for Prince said he lived a clean lifestyle and did not have a drug addiction. But later authorities found several opioid drugs at Paisley Park.

The non-descript community where Prince’s airplane landed en route to Paisley Park was made famous by the movie, “Road to Perdition,” which is based on the true story of John Looney, a gangster who ran Rock Island, which borders Moline. Looney was in business with Al Capone during the great depression. WHBF-TV 4 found tunnels under a cigar shop and a night club in Rock Island filled with Depression-era notes, dancing elephants painted on the walls and moonshine bottles. In some areas of the tunnels, passageways have been freshly patched over with cement.

I remember dancing at homecoming with my date to “Purple Rain.” I remember the song playing on the boom box at high school float-building events. It was a nice first kiss song. I find it distressing that my hometown could have had anything to do with the great artist’s death. Investigators said they found no foul play.

Quad-City teenagers of the 1980s adored Prince. May the record show the town loves you greatly, your purple majesty.