Gone But Not Forgotten - Obituaries

Dawn Brancheau

GBNF — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 14:32:57 +0000

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — The sister of a SeaWorld trainer killed by a whale says the woman loved the whales like children and wouldn’t want anything to happen to the one that pulled her into the water.

Trainer Dawn Brancheau was rubbing the whale named Tilikum after a noontime show Wednesday when the whale grabbed her and pulled her in, killing her. The park said it hasn’t decided yet what to do with the whale.

But Brancheau’s sister Diane Gross, of Indiana, says the trainer “would not want anything done to that whale.”

Gross tells the Associated Press that news of her sister’s death “hasn’t sunk in yet.”

A SeaWorld official said that because of Tilikum’s size and involvement in two previous deaths, trainers were not supposed to get into the water with him.

Mosi Tatupu

GBNF — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 14:30:02 +0000

Mosi Tatupu (Getty Images/NFL) ATTLEBORO, Mass. (AP) — Mosi Tatupu (MOE’-see tah-TOO’-poo), a fan favorite who played 13 seasons for the New England Patriots, has died. He was 54. Ashley O’Brien, a spokeswoman for Sturdy Memorial Hospital in Attleboro, Mass., said Tatupu was pronounced dead at the hospital Tuesday. She did not give a cause. Tatupu was chosen by the Patriots in the eighth round of the 1978 draft out of Southern California. He stayed with the team until 1990. The running back rushed for 2,415 yards and 18 touchdowns. He was better known for his special teams play. Tatupu had his own cheering section known as “Mosi’s Mooses.” He coached his son, Lofa, now a linebacker with the Seattle Seahawks, at King Philip Regional High School in Wrentham. Tatupu was high school star in Hawaii. Print Mosi Tatupu (Getty Images/NFL) ATTLEBORO, Mass. (AP) — Mosi Tatupu (MOE’-see tah-TOO’-poo), a fan favorite who played 13 seasons for the New England Patriots, has died. He was 54. Ashley O’Brien, a spokeswoman for Sturdy Memorial Hospital in Attleboro, Mass., said Tatupu was pronounced dead at the hospital Tuesday. She did not give a cause. Tatupu was chosen by the Patriots in the eighth round of the 1978 draft out of Southern California. He stayed with the team until 1990. The running back rushed for 2,415 yards and 18 touchdowns. He was better known for his special teams play. Tatupu had his own cheering section known as “Mosi’s Mooses.” He coached his son, Lofa, now a linebacker with the Seattle Seahawks, at King Philip Regional High School in Wrentham. Tatupu was high school star in Hawaii.

Alexander Haig

GBNF — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 19:58:30 +0000

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former Secretary of State Alexander Haig, a four-star general who served as a top adviser to three presidents and had presidential ambitions of his own, died Saturday of complications from an infection, his family said. He was 85.

Haig’s long and decorated military career launched the Washington career for which he is better known, including top posts in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations. He never lived down his televised response to the 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan.

Hours after the shooting, then Secretary of State Haig went before the cameras intending, he said later, to reassure Americans that the White House was functioning.

“As of now, I am in control here in the White House, pending the return of the vice president,” Haig said.

Some saw the comment as an inappropriate power grab in the absence of Vice President Bush, who was flying back to Washington from Texas.

Haig died at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where he was surrounded by his family, according to two of his children, Alexander and Barbara. A hospital spokesman, Gary Stephenson, said Haig died at about 1:30 a.m.

In his book, “Caveat,” Haig later wrote that he had been “guilty of a poor choice of words and optimistic if I had imagined I would be forgiven the imprecision out of respect for the tragedy of the occasion.”

Haig ran unsuccessfully for president in 1988.

“I think of him as a patriot’s patriot,” said George P. Shultz, who succeeded Haig as the country’s top diplomat in 1982.

“No matter how you sliced him it came out red, white and blue. He was always willing to serve.”

Born Dec. 2, 1924, in the Philadelphia suburb of Bala Cynwyd, Alexander Meigs Haig spent his boyhood days dreaming about a career in the military. With the help of an uncle who had congressional contacts, he secured an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1943.

After seeing combat in Korea and Vietnam, Haig — an Army colonel at the time — was tapped by Henry Kissinger to be his military adviser on the National Security Council under Nixon. Haig “soon became indispensable,” Kissinger later said of his protege.

Nixon promoted Haig in 1972 from a two-star general to a four-star rank, passing over 240 high-ranking officers with greater seniority.

The next year, as the Watergate scandal deepened, Nixon turned to Haig and appointed him to succeed H.R. Haldeman as White House chief of staff. He helped the president prepare his impeachment defense — and as Nixon was preoccupied with Watergate, Haig handled many of the day-to-day decisions normally made by the chief executive.

On Nixon’s behalf, Haig also helped arrange the wiretaps of government officials and reporters, as the president tried to plug the sources of news leaks.

About a year after assuming his new post as Nixon’s right-hand man, Haig was said to have played a key role in persuading the president to resign. He also suggested to Gerald Ford that he pardon his predecessor for any crimes committed while in office — a pardon that is widely believed to have cost Ford the presidency in 1976.

Years after serving as one of Nixon’s closest aides, Haig would be dogged by speculation that he was “Deep Throat” — the shadowy source who helped Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein break the Watergate story. Haig denied it, repeatedly, and the FBI’s Mark Felt was eventually revealed as the secret source.

Following Nixon’s resignation, Haig stayed with the new Ford administration for about six weeks, but then returned to the military as commander in chief of U.S. forces in Europe and supreme allied commander of NATO forces — a post he held for more than four years. He quit during the Carter administration over the handling of the Iran hostage crisis.

Haig briefly explored a run for presidency in 1979, but decided he didn’t have enough support and instead took a job as president of United Technologies — his first job in the private sector since high school.

When Ronald Reagan became the 40th president of the United States, Haig returned to public service as Reagan’s secretary of state, and declared himself the “vicar of American foreign policy.”

His 17-month tenure was marked by turf wars with other top administration officials — including Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and national security adviser William Clark.

Two months into the new administration, Haig was portrayed as pounding a table in frustration when the chairmanship of a crisis management team went to Bush. Despite the clashes, Haig received high praise from professional diplomats for trying to achieve a stable relationship with the Soviet Union.

In his book, Haig said he had concluded during a 1982 trip to Europe with the president that the “effort to write my character out of the script was under way with a vengeance.” He resigned days later.

Describing himself as a “dark horse,” Haig sought the Republican presidential nomination for the 1988 elections. On the campaign trail, he told supporters about his desire to “keep the Reagan revolution alive,” but he also railed against the administration’s bulging federal deficit — calling it an embarrassment to the GOP.

Haig dropped out of the race just days before the New Hampshire primary.

During his career in public service, Haig became known for some of his more colorful or long-winded language. When asked by a judge to explain an 18 1/2-minute gap in one of the Nixon tapes, Haig responded: “Perhaps some sinister force had come in.”

And later, when he criticized Reagan’s “fiscal flabbiness,” Haig asserted that the “ideological religiosity” of the administration’s economic policies were to blame for doubling the national debt to $2 trillion in 1987.

Haig is survived by his wife of 60 years, Patricia; his children Alexander, Brian and Barbara; eight grandchildren; and his brother, the Rev. Francis R. Haig.

Jasper Howard

GBNF — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:31:56 +0000

STORRS, Conn. (AP) — A Connecticut football player who was an expectant father was stabbed to death early Sunday after an on-campus dance, just hours after helping his team to a homecoming victory.

Jasper Howard, 20, of Miami, and another student were stabbed during a fight after a fire alarm was pulled during a university sanctioned dance at the UConn Student Union just after 12:30 a.m., police said.

Police had not identified a suspect or released the name of the other victim.

Connecticut coach Randy Edsall said the team was heartbroken and devastated over the loss of Howard, a junior and the team’s starting cornerback who came to the school to get away from the violence on the streets of his hometown. He became the first person in his family to go to college.

“I know this,” Edsall said, his eyes red and welling with tears, “he loved UConn; he loved his teammates; he loved everything about this.”

Edsall said Howard’s death was especially tragic, because he was about to become a father. No additional information about the expectant mother, identified by Edsall as Howard’s girlfriend, was provided by police or the university.

Jasper Howard, 20, died after getting stabbed after Connecticut’s game Saturday Joanglia Howard said she got news of her son’s death about 4 a.m., and described him as a ‘good kid’ who never got into trouble.

“All I wanted him to do was go to school and get an education, and he was doing what I asked him to do,” she told WSVN-TV in Miami.

Edsall gathered his team at its training facility at 6 a.m. to deliver the news.

“As Jazz looks down on us, I can promise him and his family, that son or daughter will have 105 uncles,” punter Desi Cullen, a team captain, said at an afternoon news conference. “And we will do what it takes to not get through this, but to grow from it.”

UConn Police Major Ronald Blicher said this is the first homicide at the university in the more than 30 years he has been associated with the school.

Blicher said Howard was stabbed following a fight between two groups that included students and non-students. The altercation broke out just after a fire alarm went off in the student center, forcing the evacuation of about 300 people, from a “Welcome Back” party and dance sponsored by the school’s West Indian Awareness Organization.

Police and the school declined to say whether any other athletes were involved in the incident.

Police cordoned off the crime scene near the university’s Gampel Pavilion basketball arena for much of the day.

“Certainly not all 300 saw this event,” Blicher said. “We have been actively interviewing people through the night and day, and we continue to seek anybody who might have information.”

Police were trying to determine whether the alarm and the fight were related.

The university community was sent messages warning them to be cautious, but Blicher said officials don’t believe anyone else is in danger and that the stabbing did not appear premeditated.

“The university does not have an individual walking around just stabbing people,” Blicher said.

Howard and the other stabbing victim were taken to Windham Community Memorial Hospital, where the second victim was treated and released. Howard was later airlifted to Saint Francis Hospital and Medical Center in Hartford, where he died from his injuries.

Edsall drove to the hospital Sunday morning and was asked to identify Howard’s body.

“One of my sons has been taken away,” the coach said.

University President Michael Hogan told The Associated Press the stabbing is a tragedy for the entire university community.

“I was in the locker room after the game yesterday. It was such a joyous moment,” Hogan said. “To go from that game and such a victory to the developments at 12:30 last night is such a tragedy.”

Howard had a career-high 11 tackles Saturday against Louisville and made perhaps the game’s biggest play, forcing a fumble just as Louisville was about to score with UConn up 21-13 in the third quarter. UConn won 38-25, and following the game, Howard, who led the Big East in punt returns last season, talked to the AP about the play.

“I felt my hand go on the ball and I felt that I had a chance to get it out. I just stripped it out. It was a big play. We needed it,” he said.

Corey Bell, director of football operations at the University of Miami, coached Howard at Miami Edison High School.

He told The Miami-Herald Sunday that he was stunned.

“I’m real close to all my guys, but Jazz and I were real close,” Bell said. “We spoke at least once every week. He’s a great kid, coachable, dependable, real tough mentally and talented. He had dreams of getting to the next level and making it and taking care of his mom and his sister.”

A phone and e-mail message left with the Miami’s media relations department were not immediately returned.

New England Patriots cornerback Darius Butler, described by Edsall as the player who taught Howard the ropes while at UConn, was shaken by the news.

“It hasn’t settled in, but it was tough on the UConn family,” Butler said. “He’s in my thoughts and prayers.”

The school was arranging for Howard’s parents to come to Connecticut. He also had two teenage sisters.

The student union was reopened late Sunday, and the snack shop there was soon doing a brisk business.

Aaron Price, a 19-year-old music major, said he was a bit concerned that nobody had yet been arrested, but didn’t fear for his own safety.

“I’ve never felt unsafe,” he said. “I’ve never even thought about whether or not I felt safe.”

Gov. M. Jodi Rell visited the campus Sunday to offer her condolences and any assistance the university might need.

Edsall said the team will not practice until Tuesday, but plans on playing next Saturday at West Virginia. He said they would wear some remembrance of Howard, and would plan a more permanent memorial at the team’s training center.

“The Howard family will get through this, as well as the UConn family,” Edsall said. “Because we are determined and we are willing to make sure that Jazz will be honored in the right way, and how we do things is what he’ll be expecting out of all of us.”

Cullen Bryant

GBNF — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 21:40:59 +0000

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Cullen Bryant, who spent 11 seasons with the Los Angeles Rams, was a running back on their 1980 Super Bowl team and fought the NFL’s trading rules to remain in town, has died. He was 58. Unknown to his family, Bryant had been under a doctor’s care when he died Tuesday at his home in Colorado Springs, Colo., said his sister-in-law, Wanda E. Bryant. She did not supply other details. Bryant was the Rams’ second-round draft pick in 1973. He played with the team until 1982, was with the Seattle Seahawks in 1983 and 1984 and returned to the Rams for his last pro season in 1987. In 13 NFL seasons, Bryant scored 23 rushing and receiving touchdowns and ran back kickoffs for three others. He ran for 3,264 yards in 849 carries, and caught 148 passes for 1,176 yards. He ran for a 1-yard touchdown in the 1980 Super Bowl, which the Rams lost to the Pittsburgh Steelers, 31-19. At 6-foot-1 and 234 pounds, he was the biggest player of the time to regularly return kickoffs. “When Cullen hits those holes, nobody wants to stick their nose in there,” teammate Jack Youngblood told the Los Angeles Times in 1979. “Those little 180-pound (defensive backs) just jump on his back when he runs by.” “He was an outstanding person with great character traits,” said Chuck Knox, Bryant’s coach with both the Rams and Seahawks. “When we asked him to do certain things, he’d do them. He never complained about anything. When he got that big body moving, it was something else, and he had muscles on top of muscles.” Born William Cullen Bryant on May 20, 1951, in Fort Sill, Okla., Bryant attended high school in Colorado Springs and played football at Colorado University, where he received consensus All-American recognition. In 1975, only two years after going to the Rams, Bryant went to federal court to challenge the right of then-NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle to order him off the team. The Rams had signed former Detroit Lions receiver Ron Jessie. Under the “Rozelle Rule” on free agents, the team signing a free agent had to compensate the team that lost the player. If the teams couldn’t agree on compensation, the commissioner had the power to award either draft choices or players. He decided Bryant should go to Detroit. At the behest of Rams owner Carroll Rosenbloom, Bryant went to court in Los Angeles. A judge was unsympathetic to the NFL’s position during a hearing, and the league backed off several days later before a ruling could be made. The Rozelle Rule eventually was modified. Bryant, who was divorced, is survived by three brothers; two adult sons, William Cullen Jr. and Brandon, and a 13-year-old daughter, Brianna. Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press

SUGGS-FOXWORTH, HALEY MARIE

GBNF — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 19:02:12 +0000

Haley Marie Suggs-Foxworth Haley “Haley Bugg” Marie Suggs-Foxworth, a resident of Ashford, died early Monday morning, October 12, 2009, in the Shands at the University of Florida in Gainesville, FL hospital. She was 16. Funeral services will be held at 11:00 a.m. Friday, October 16, 2009, in the Ashford High School Auditorium with Rev. Kevin Freeman and Rev. Danny Bynum officiating. Burial will follow in the Antioch Baptist Cemetery, near Ashford. Holman-Head-land Mortuary is in charge of funeral arrangements. The family will receive friends from 4:00 until 7:00 p.m. Thursday in the Ashford High School Auditorium. Flowers will be accepted or memorial contributions may be made to the Car-ingBridge, Donation Processing Center, P.O. Box 131447, Houston, TX 77219-1447 or to the American Cancer Society , 2346 West Main Street, Dothan, AL 36301. Haley Marie Suggs-Foxworth was born and reared in Ashford where she lived all her lifetime. She was an 11th grade student at Ashford High School where she was a member of the FFA and formerly participated in softball. Haley “Bugg” was a member of the Antioch Baptist Church. She was preceded in death by her grandfather, Robert Evans and an uncle, Robert Darrell Evans, Jr. Surviving relatives include her parents, Melissa Evans Foxworth and Todd Foxworth, Ashford; and Robert Suggs, Ashford; a sister, Tori Foxworth, Ashford; a brother, Hunter Suggs, Slocomb; her grandparents, Katherine and William “Bill” Lowe, Montezuma, GA; Jimmy and Shirley Foxworth, Pansey; James and Carol Suggs, Ashford; her great grandparents, Victor and Betty Hull, Dothan; and Freida Pierson, Ohio; her best friend, Chelsea “Bakon” Smith, Pansey; her boyfriend, Zack Gaz, Traverse City, MI; several aunts, uncles, cousins and a host of friends. Serving as active pall-bearers will be Kenneth Hunter, Caleb Mullikin, Christopher Carroll, Luke Lien, B.J. Perkins and Cody Brown. Serving as honorary pallbearers will be the Ashford High School 11th Grade Class, T.J. Emerson and Chelsea Smith. Holman-Headland Mortuary, (334) 693-3371, www.holmanmortuaries.com is in charge of arrangements.

Al Martino

GBNF — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:41:51 +0000

SPRINGFIELD, Pa. (AP) — Singer Al Martino, who played the Frank Sinatra-type role of Johnny Fontane in “The Godfather,” died Tuesday afternoon at his childhood home. He was 82.

Publicist Sandy Friedman, of the Rogers & Cowan public relations firm, confirmed Martino’s death in the Philadelphia suburb of Springfield, in Delaware County, but didn’t cite a cause.

Starting in 1952, Martino was known for hit songs including “Here in My Heart,” ”Spanish Eyes,” ”Can’t Help Falling in Love” and “Volare.”

Besides acting in the Marlon Brando classic “The Godfather,” Martino sang the 1972 film’s title score, “The Love Theme From The Godfather.” His Fontane character is a singer and occasional actor and is the godson of Brando’s Mafia boss character, Don Vito Corleone.

Martino was born in South Philadelphia as Alfred Cini and was a longtime resident of Beverly Hills, Calif.

Philadelphia radio and television personality Jerry Blavat dined with Martino and his wife on Monday night. Blavat told the Philadelphia Daily News that Martino appeared to be in fine shape and that he was shocked when he learned of the singer’s death.

“He was the last of the show business legends,” said Blavat, who has played Martino’s songs on the radio for years. “There’s nobody else. The last of the performers. A magnificent voice.”

Bruce Wasserstein

GBNF — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:27:20 +0000

Bruce Wasserstein, the Wall Street investment banker who helped pioneer the hostile takeover in the 1980s and reshaped the mergers and acquisitions business into a high art, died Wednesday.

Mr. Wasserstein, 61, was the chairman and chief executive of Lazard. The cause of death could not be immediately learned, though he had been hospitalized earlier this week for what was described as an irregular heartbeat. The company had described his condition then as serious, but said he was “stable and recovering.”

Mr. Wasserstein, who began his career as a lawyer but quickly moved into investment banking, worked on some of the biggest deals of the past three decades, including Kohlberg Kravis Roberts’s takeover of RJR Nabisco.

Mr. Wasserstein never looked like a stereotypically urbane investment banker, long preferring a rumpled look, his shirt often untucked. But he transformed deal-making from a business built on relationships, as practiced by forebears like Andre Meyer and Felix G. Rohatyn of Lazard, into one built on high-priced free agency.

To Mr. Wasserstein, deal-making was a chess game, one ripe for complex strategies — that often came at high cost. Never one to easily lose a deal, he often urged clients to reach deep into their pocketbooks to win, often stroking their egos with what became known as his “Dare to be Great” speech. (Critics bestowed upon him a sobriquet he detested: “Bid-‘em Up Bruce.”)

“He was a great tactician,” Mr. Rohatyn said Wednesday. “He frightened people. That’s why they called him ’Bid-‘em Up Bruce.’”

Mr. Wasserstein was never afraid to speak his mind. After working on a three-way takover battle for City Service involving Gulf Oil and the corporate raider Boone Pickens, he said: “There are ten people in the world who know how to do these kinds of deals. And Boone Pickens isn’t one of them.”

Bruce Wasserstein was born Dec. 25, 1947, in Brooklyn. Even in his youth, Mr. Wasserstein was known for his precocity. One of his sisters, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein (who died of lymphoma in 2006), once remembered her hiking adventures with her brother.

”At the end of the trail, Bruce planted a stick, proclaiming it Bruceania,” she said. “It never occurred to me to claim the new world as Wendyania.”

He graduated from the University of Michigan at the age of 19, moving to Harvard Law School and the Harvard Business School, where he somewhat improbably served as one of Ralph Nader’s “Nader’s Raiders.” He later studied at Cambridge University in England as a Knox Fellow.

After graduation, he first began working at the law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore. But he soon left for the more lucrative world of banking, joining the nascent mergers and acquisitions department at First Boston.

Together with Joseph Perella, Mr. Wasserstein built the firm into a powerhouse deal shop. Many of the deals that symbolized the frenzy that was the 1980s Wall Street — Texaco’s acquisition of Getty Oil, ABC’s sale to Capital Cities — bore their fingerprints. (Mr. Rohatyn said he tried to lure Mr. Wasserstein and Mr. Perella to Lazard in the 1980s.)

But in 1988, after months of public feuding with First Boston, he and Mr. Perella left to set up their own shop, Wasserstein Perella & Company, taking many of their former colleagues and clients.

“When Bruce and Joe left First Boston, they and their colleagues came across Park Ave to our office to continue working on a number of major deals,” said Martin Lipton, a partner at the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz and another gray eminence of deal-making. “They were so busy that they overloaded our phone system so that they, and we, were out of business for several hours.”

It was there that Mr. Wasserstein advised on K.K.R.’s takeover of Nabisco, memorably recaptured in the book “Barbarians at the Gate.”

Though Mr. Perella left the boutique firm in the 1990s, Mr. Wasserstein stayed on and sold it to Dresdner Bank in 2000 for about $1.4 billion. Ever the inveterate deal-maker, much of those proceeds went to him.

In 2002, he was hired by Lazard’s Michel David-Weill, then the firm’s chairman, to run the investment bank he had long admired. Mr. Wasserstein, however, persuaded many of the firm’s deal-makers to support one of the biggest deals of his career: taking Lazard public and ending more than a century of private ownership. The move set off a bitter feud between the two men, one often played out in the press.

Soon after Lazard went public, Mr. Wasserstein embarked on another major deal, aiding Carl C. Icahn in trying to shake up AOL Time Warner, his former client. However, that effort ended quietly, with the company reaching a compromise with the gadfly investor.

Most recently, he has led the team advising Kraft in its potential takeover of Cadbury.

But Mr. Wasserstein had interests beyond the boardroom. In 2004, he made a surprise bid for New York magazine, defeating some of the city’s richest businessmen in the process. Years before, he purchased a passel of trade publications including The Deal, a trade publication aimed at deal-makers, and American Lawyer, one aimed at the legal field. He sold the magazine group to Incisive Media, a British publisher, in 2007 for $630 million.

Adam Moss, New York’s editor in chief, described Mr. Wasserstein as an unusual owner for the magazine.

“He had always been interested in journalism, an interest sharpened by being on the receiving end of it,” Mr. Moss said. “But he never used it to wield influence the way other powerful men would have, never tried to plant a story, never complained about anything we published.

“He just took a kind of personal pleasure in owning it, and was an enormous believer in it as a business.”

Mr. Wasserstein is survived by his wife, Angela Chao, and seven children, including the daughter of his sister Wendy. He has been divorced three times.

– Andrew Ross Sorkin and Michael J. de la Merced

Lou Albano

GBNF — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 23:02:31 +0000

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Captain Lou Albano, the charismatic professional wrestler who appeared in Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” video, has died. He was 76.

World Wrestling Entertainment confirmed the death Thursday on its Web site.

Albano performed with WWE from 1983 to 1996, when he was inducted into its hall of fame. He began his wrestling career in Canada in 1953.

Albano expanded his fan base greatly when he played Lauper’s father in the video for her hit single on a fledgling MTV in 1983. He later claimed to be the catalyst for her success, according to WWE.

Stephen Gately

GBNF — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 18:05:03 +0000

PORT D’ANDRATX, Mallorca (AP) – Stephen Gately, a singer with the Irish boy band Boyzone who made headlines when he came out as gay a decade ago, has died while on vacation in Spain, the group said on its Web site. He was 33.

Gately “tragically died” on Saturday while visiting the island of Mallorca, the band said in a brief statement. The cause of death was not immediately clear.

Gerald Kean, a Gately family friend in Ireland, said Sunday the singer died of natural causes, without identifying them.

“There’s no foul play involved, and it’s not suicide. It’s just a tragic accident is what we’ve been told, and we’re happy that that is correct information,” Kean said. “There is nothing untoward. It’s not drugs, we don’t believe. It’s not suicide. It’s not murder. It’s not a fight. That’s what we’ve been told.”

Kean said an autopsy was expected to be conducted Tuesday.

Gately and his partner Andrew Cowles, who were wed in a civil uni on in 2006, were in Mallorca together, the band’s statement said.

“At present we don’t have too many details,” the statement said. Members of the group were expected to arrive at Palma de Mallorca international airport Sunday afternoon.

Spanish police said they were called to a house near Port d’Andratx on the western tip of the island on Saturday afternoon. The cause of death was unknown and there were no signs of violence, a police spokesman said, on condition of anonymity in keeping with police rules. He said there was likely to be an autopsy.

The house, situated on an exclusive tree-lined seafront street, overlooks a rocky bay reputed to have some of the best sunset views on Spain’s favorite holiday island.

By midday Sunday journalists had begun to gather outside the quiet, seaside building with several vacation apartments.

Boyzone members Ronan Keating, Keith Duffy, Mikey Graham and Shane Lynch said they were “completely devastated by the l o ss of our friend and brother, Stephen.”

“We have shared such wonderful times together over the years and were all looking forward to sharing many more. Stephen was a beautiful person in both body and spirit. He lit up our lives and those of the many friends he had all over the world. Our love and sympathy go out to Andrew and Stephen’s family. We love you and will miss you forever, ‘Steo’,” their statement said.

Boyzone was a U.K. hitmaker in the 1990s and announced a comeback tour at the end of last year. Gately also had released several solo singles and appeared in stage musicals, including “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”

He revealed his sexual orientation to a British newspaper in 1999.

Elton John said Sunday that he and his partner, David Furnish, were “stunned by this tragedy.”

“Stephen was the kindest, gentlest soul. We send our love and condolences to his partner Andy and to all his friends everywhere,” John said in a stat e ment.

Boyzone was one of the biggest acts to come out of Ireland in the 1990s. Former Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern said Gately’s death was “a huge tragedy to Irish entertainment, Irish music and further afield as well.”

“Boyzone and Stephen, they’ve all been part of Irish life and far wider than that, the last 15 years, and so successful, so it’s a huge, huge tragedy. It’s so sad,” Ahern said.

Boyzone sold millions of records and topped the British charts with six No. 1 singles during the 1990s, including “All That I Need” and a cover of the Bee Gees’ “Words.”

The group was formed in 1993 by impresario Louis Walsh, who placed an ad in the press announcing auditions for Ireland’s first boy band. Among the unsuccessful hopefuls was actor Colin Farrell.