Lil Peep's Suspected Drug Overdose Was an Accident, Brother Says

Lil Peep has died
Lil Peep attends the Balmain Menswear Spring/Summer 2018 show as part of Paris Fashion Week in Paris, France, June 24, 2017. Pascal Le Segretain/Getty

Lil Peep's brother broke his silence after the New York rapper died from a suspected drug overdose on Wednesday. Karl Åhr, who goes by Oskar, argued Peep's ultimately death at the age of 21 was an accident.

"We [the family] have heard there was some sort of substance he did not expect to be involved in the substance he was taking," Oskar, 23, told People magazine in a Friday interview. "He thought he could take what he did, but he had been given something and he didn't realize what it was."

One of Peep's final Instagram videos showed the rapper dropping Xanax into his mouth. The burgeoning star struggled with addiction and suffered from mental illness. He was open about his battle with drugs and depression.

But his tragic death was not on purpose. "It was an accident, it really was an accident," Oskar said. "He was super happy with where he was in life."

 

A post shared by @lilpeep on

Peep, whose birth name was Gustav Åhr, rapped about his struggle with pills. In the song Drugz he says: "Yeah, I do them drugs, I don't give a fuck what you think/ I got blood, I got mud, I got bud, I got drank/ Only do it for the pain, it be fuckin' up my brain/"

But Oskar argued being sad was his brother's persona. "He was not as sad as people think he was," Oskar told People. "It's frustrating as someone who remembers a happy brother."

He blamed the music industry for Peep's drug abuse. "I can guarantee [drugs are] not something that would've been a part of his life if he was not a part of that specific culture," he said. "Not only was he a part of it, he'll be remembered for making waves in it."

While Oskar maintained that Peep the rapper was different than Gustav his brother, Peep wrote about his struggle to find balance in one of his last Instagram posts.

"I just wanna be everybody's everything I want too much from people but then I don't want anything from them at the same time u feel me I don't let people help me but I need help but not when I have my pills but that's temporary one day maybe I won't die young and I'll be happy?" he wrote on Wednesday. "What is happy I always have happiness for like 10 seconds and then it's gone. I'm getting so tired of this."

Peep's official cause of death was not immediately known. It could take up to eight weeks for the toxicology results to come back.

Follow me on Twitter @mariamzzarella

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About the writer


Maria Vultaggio is a Brooklynite originally hailing from Long Island. She studied English at Stony Brook University and interned at the ... Read more

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