Aaron Carter, the former child pop star, has died at the age of 34.
According to TMZ, Carter’s body was found in a bathtub at his house in Lancaster, California on Saturday morning.
A cause of death was not immediately clear, but police told TMZ that there was no indication of foul play.
Carter hailed from Tampa, Florida, the younger brother of Backstreet Boys singer Nick Carter. Following in Nick’s footsteps, Aaron began performing at age seven and released his self-titled debut album in 1997 at age nine. His sophomore album, 2000’s Aaron’s Party (Come Get It), was certified 3x platinum after selling three million copies and hitting No. 4 on the Billboard 200. His follow-up third album, 2001’s Oh Aaron, also went platinum.
As the trend of boy bands fell out of favor in the mid-2000s, Carter gravitated to reality television. He co-starred alongside brother Nick on House of Carters and appeared on a season of Dancing with the Stars.
While Carter continued to put out music through the 2010s and early 2020s, he mostly made headlines for his issues with mental health and ensuing legal troubles. During an appearance on The Doctors in 2017, Carter revealed that he’d been diagnosed with personality disorder, schizophrenia, manic depression, and acute anxiety. A short time later, Nick Carter filed a restraining order against Aaron, citing his “increasingly alarming behavior,” which included alleged threats of violence towards Nick’s family. A judge subsequently ordered Aaron to surrender his cache of 500 guns after concluding that he was mentally unfit to possess them.
