Artist News Legal

Late Slipknot bassist’s wife testifies against former doctor

By | Published on Friday 25 April 2014

Paul Gray

The wife of late Slipknot bassist Paul Gray testified at the trial of his former doctor earlier this week.

As previously reported, Dr Daniel Baldi is accused of the involuntary manslaughter of Gray, who died of a drug overdose in 2010, and eight other patients. Criminal proceedings were launched in 2012 after Baldi was subject to four medical malpractice lawsuits, including three wrongful death suits, mainly for prescribing dangerous levels of prescription medications to patients.

With the trial now underway, Brenna Gray was called to testify on Wednesday, reports The Des Moines Register. She told the court that in the months leading up to her husband’s death, she had attempted to convince Baldi to take his addiction to various prescription drugs more seriously. Although the doctor eventually provided pills to treat the addiction, she said, he also continued to supply the musician with other drugs, particularly pain medication Xanax, which she described as Gray’s “drug of choice”.

She also said that she had shown the doctor pictures of her husband passed out from drug use, and told him that she had found hypodermic needles in their house. Baldi’s lawyer Guy Cook countered that there was no mention of this in Gray’s medical records, to which Brenna responded: “A lot of things weren’t noted in there”.

Cook also said that the only drug prescribed by the doctor found in the hotel room where Gray died was Suboxone, which is used to treat drug addiction. Toxicology reports found that Gray had died from an overdose of Fentanyl and morphine, neither of which were prescribed by Baldi. The lawyer suggested that Gray had in fact bought these drugs “on the street somewhere” meaning that his death was “nobody’s fault except Mr Gray or the person he got it from”.

Tearfully, Brenna Gray replied that she “wasn’t with him” so had no idea where he might have got the drugs from.

Gray had checked himself into the hotel where he died after his wife and members of their family had staged an intervention, she explained in court. He disappeared after the intervention but, fearing that she would be arrested and their then unborn child taken away by authorities if she called the police and they found the drugs her husband had hidden in their house, Gray instead called on friends and family to help track him down.

In this part of her testimony she was particularly damning of Gray’s Slipknot bandmates – two of whom, Corey Taylor and Shawn Crahan, are also due to testify – saying that they had refused to help.

“One was playing golf two minutes away from our house but couldn’t come”, she said. “Nobody else cared, nobody was involved. They told me it was my problem”.

The case continues.



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