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:
“Because you live, O Christ,
the spirit bird of hope is freed for flying,
our cages of despair no longer keep us closed and life-denying.
The stone has rolled away and death cannot imprison!
O sing this Easter Day, for Jesus Christ has risen!”
—Shirley Erena Murray (20th century)
“Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof; but in the open world it passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are marked by changes in the face of Nature. What seems a kind of temporal death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and living slumber to the man who sleeps afield.”
—Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894)
“Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,
In the Beginning how the Heav’ns and Earth
Rose out of Chaos:”
—John Milton (1608–1674)