Death
On May 28, 1975, Emerson's body was found next to his bicycle, near the West Side Highway, in Manhattan. Emerson's death is listed officially as a hit and run. He was 30 years old. To date, no one has been arrested or charged in connection with his death. Following a weekend-long wake hosted by Max's Kansas City owner Mickey Ruskin, Emerson was buried in Wharton, New Jersey.
After Emerson's death, various reports surfaced that he was not killed in a hit and run accident, but overdosed on heroin in a different location, and was dumped as staged hit and run. These reports have never been substantiated, and Emerson's official cause of death has never been changed.
In the book Making Tracks, Debbie Harry provided an account of the circumstances surrounding Emerson's death:
One night we were over at Eric's apartment working on a tape of "Heart of Glass" on his Teac fourtrack tape recorder, when he suddenly staggered out of the kitchen looking ashen. He looked even more distraught and sad when we left. Being satisfied drove him crazy in the end, because he had everything so he didn't care about anything anymore. He used to go out jogging every day, and did feats of physical endurance like strapping twenty-pound weights to each ankle and then bicycling up to the Factory. The next day we were sitting around the house just after we woke up when Barbara called with the bad news. "Oh, Eric got hit by a truck." He had been a good friend and inspiration to so many people. We didn't quite understand what had happened, but we went up to a party/wake held for him and saw a lot of people from the earlier glitter days. Eric's death definitely marked an end to the glitter period. We still miss him.
Read more about this topic: Eric Emerson
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“In taking out an insurance policy one pays for it in dollars and cents, always at liberty to discontinue payments. If, however, woman’s premium is a husband, she pays for it with her name, her privacy, her self-respect, her very life, “until death doth part.””
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“He should be as vigorous as a sugar maple, with sap enough to maintain his own verdure,... and not like a vine, which being cut in the spring bears no fruit, but bleeds to death in the endeavor to heal its wounds.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“So he with difficulty and labour hard
Moved on, with difficulty and labour he;
But he once passed, soon after when man fell,
Strange alteration! Sin and Death amain
Following his track, such was the will of Heaven,
Paved after him a broad and beaten way
Over the dark abyss, whose boiling gulf
Tamely endured a bridge of wondrous length
From hell continued reaching th’ utmost orb
Of this frail world;”
—John Milton (1608–1674)