Whitney's Death: An Earlier Incident?

EXCLUSIVE — Whitney Houston’s death made for a long day’s journey into night at the Beverly Hilton. While the Clive Davis Grammy dinner had to proceed downstairs in the ballroom–with 800 guests already filing in as the news was breaking–Whitney remained in state, so to speak, in her fourth floor suite. She was not removed until just moments before the party ended–a little after midnight. She’d been in the suite, discovered in her bathtub. But there were many people in the suite when this happened at 3:50pm including her daughter Bobbi Kristina, her brother Gary, sister in law Pat Houston, and another player in this story — a nightlife friend who’d been guiding her around town the last few days as she was photographed in states of duress.
What you don’t know is that around 11pm, paramedics were called back to the fourth floor. Security and police raced back to the 4th floor. A medical wheelchair with restraints was brought in through the back entrance to the hotel. Bobbi Kristina “freaked out”–well, she’d been upstairs for hours with her mother’s dead body in the next room. It was understandable. The paramedics thought they were going to to have to take her to the hospital. But calm was restored. For ten minutes, though, security cleared the entire lobby of the hotel while the concert was going on inside the ballroom. I was out there at that moment, and it was one of the strangest scenes ever.

Then there’s the mysterious story of a leak that occurred the night before from Whitney’s group of suites. A man on the third floor right underneath Houston’s suite suddenly experienced water cascading into his bathroom from above at 2:30am. It wasn’t just a trickle. The man called security, then went upstairs to the fourth floor to see what was going on. He swears to me that it was Whitney’s bathtub that was overflowing. He also says that a flat screen television had been been broken–the screen was smashed. My sources at the hotel say there was a “leak” but that it wasn’t from Whitney’s room. “They [her group] have a lot of rooms up there,” says the hotel source. My source, this man, insists that he was told it was Whitney Houston’s room. It does seem to have been part of her group of rooms.


There are many mysteries here. None of them have been reported or solved by TMZ or one of the other muckracking tabloids. I know the man who had to pull Whitney out of the bathtub yesterday and attempt to give her CPR. He told me, “She was already dead. There was nothing I could do.”
More on Whitney’s death and the Grammy party follows in the next post. And believe me, dear readers, this isn’t easy. I’ve known Whitney Houston and her family for over 25 years. She was a beautiful girl with a big heart. She was full of optimism. Her mother is one of the finest people. The people who worked for and with her were devoted to her. When the shock turns to anger there will be a lot of finger pointing. But in the end, Whitney ruled her own world.


Roger Friedman, Contributor