After a day of speculation and hope, rock legend Tom Petty passed away Monday night at the age of 66.
The moment we all feared has come to pass. Tom Petty, one of the last true icons of rock, has passed away following a full cardiac arrest episode Sunday night that left him on life support. News of the rocker’s demise quickly spread online, but as we reported yesterday the initial posts about his death were unfounded. Petty did not actually pass away until almost Midnight EST on Monday, and when he went he was surrounded by those who loved him most.
A statement posted to Tom Petty’s official channels reads:
On behalf of the Tom Petty family we are devastated to announce the untimely death of our father, husband, brother, leader and friend Tom Petty.
He suffered cardiac arrest at his home in Malibu in the early hours of this morning and was taken to UCLA Medical Center but could not be revived.
He died peacefully at 8:40pm PST surrounded by family, his bandmates and friends.
- Tony Dimitriades, longtime manager of Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers on behalf of the family
It is hard to express the way we felt learning the news story we ran on Tom Petty’s death yesterday. On the one hand we were hopeful that there might still be more time with the man behind “Mary Jane’s Last Dance,” but at the same time we felt awful for having wrongly declared him dead. Our team has talked about what could be done to better improve our reporting on celebrity passings, and moving forward we hope to implement several changes that we feel will greatly improve our accuracy when covering these matters.
For now, we mourn with the rest of the rock community. Rest easy, Tom. Your legend and music will outlive us all.
