Could Juice WRLD have swallowed a fatal quantity of pills on Sunday to hide them from federal agents?
Chicago police spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi told the Associated Press that officers and federal agents were waiting for the private jet’s arrival after being tipped that there were drugs and weapons on board.
During a search inside a private hangar at Midway airport, a drug-sniffing dog alerted to luggage that had been taken off the plane. Investigators found dozens of bags of marijuana, six bottles of prescription cough syrup, three guns, metal-piercing bullets and a high-capacity ammunition magazine.
Two men who were on the plane were arrested on gun charges.
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Juice, whose real name is Jarad Higgins, started convulsing while the search was underway. A federal agent administered Narcan after the rapper’s girlfriend Ally Lotti advised he had taken the opioid Percocet.
Juice regained consciousness and was rushed to Advocate Christ Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead at around 3:15 a.m. local time.
An autopsy was performed Monday but results of a toxicology test are pending.
Juice had been open about using Percocet and Xanax when he was younger. In a 2018 interview with Atlanta radio station Hot 107.9, he spoke about doing "lean" – a mix of cough syrup and soda and hard candy – since he was in the 6th grade.
“It’s not as easy as seeing somebody die and being like ‘Oh my God, that’s a wake up call, I’m going to stop,'" he said. "It’ll make you think like ‘Damn, I don’t want that to happen to me.’ But at the same time you’re already addicted. Your body is screaming for that s**t.”
In an interview with XXL published in October, Juice said he quit drinking lean in July because “it just wasn’t healthy” but he was still vaping and using marijuana. “People really be dying off these things,” he said. “I’m tryna avoid that.”