Who found Kurt Cobain?
It’s a testament to Kurt Cobain’s stature in the alternative music world when an entire chapter in rock is felt to have closed upon his untimely death.
As ever, the Nirvana frontman’s violent end has become wrapped up in an unfortunate mythos, irresponsible romanticism, and crass conspiracies that have shrouded Cobain’s death since his body was found in 1994.
But the so-called grunge movement he reluctantly spearheaded indeed seemed to turn a page, the unlikely moment Seattle’s alternative fringes had suddenly found themselves all over the Billboard Hot 100, a catapult to stardom Cobain wasn’t prepared for.
By April 1st, Cobain’s mental health issues, a debilitating stomach pain, and a gnawing heroin habit had begun to seriously take hold. After a suspected suicide attempt in Rome, a brief stay in Los Angeles’ Exodus Recovery Center was abandoned two days later after scaling a six-foot wall to fly back to his Seattle home. Following Cobain’s departure from LA, little was known to friends and family as to his whereabouts, but it’s understood that he purchased shotgun shells from a local gun shop.
Around the afternoon of April 5th, Cobain barricaded himself in the greenhouse above the garage of his Lake Washington Boulevard East home by propping a stool against its French doors. Evidence at the scene suggested Cobain wrote a parting note in red ink addressed to his childhood imaginary friend Boddah, left his wallet on the floor with his driver’s license displayed, shot up heroin from the drugs he kept in a cigar box, then pressed a Remington Model 11 20-gauge shotgun to his mouth and fatally pulled the trigger. He was 27 years old.
So, who found Cobain’s body?
It took roughly three days for his body to be discovered. On the morning of April 8th, VECA Electric employee Gary Smith arrived at Cobain’s residence as planned to install some security lighting.
Reportedly, Smith had thought he’d either seen Cobain asleep on the floor or a dummy until spotting the surrounding blood. “I noticed something on the floor, and I thought it was a mannequin,” Smith apparently told local news station KIRO 7 shortly after. “So I looked a little closer and geez, that’s a person. I looked a little closer, and I could see blood and an ear and a weapon laying on his chest.”
Once news of Cobain’s death was first reported on Seattle’s KXRX-FM, it didn’t take long before the entire music world was in mourning. MTV played repeats of Nirvana’s Unplugged performance, local fans came to the Cobain household to grieve outside, and vigils were held across the world, including a 5,000-strong memorial near the city’s Space Needle. Pearl Jam even abandoned a scheduled US tour due to being so blindsided by the shocking news.
As the years go by, lurid claims of murder have been strenuously rejected by Cobain’s family, a grim feature of the lore surrounding the late Nirvana frontman.
“We all know that Kurt killed himself,” his father and stepmother, Donald and Jenny, stated to People in 2004, reflecting on the event’s tenth anniversary. “Courtney did not kill him nor did she have him killed. We hope that all the quacks who try to make money by questioning his death will remember the music and remember that he did have a family that loved him and a beautiful little girl who doesn’t deserve to forever be reminded of the garbage surrounding his death.”
