Image: Bobby Brown leaves the funeral service of ex-wife pop singer Whitney Houston at the New Hope Baptist Church in Newark, New Jersey, in this file photo taken February 18, 2012. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri/Files
By Letitia Stein
REUTERS – R&B singer Bobby Brown, in his first interview since the death of his daughter with singer Whitney Houston, said the outcome could have been different if he had been with her shortly before an incident that left her with irreversible brain damage.
In an emotional interview set to air on Monday, Brown teared up talking about his 22-year-old daughter, Bobbi Kristina Brown, whose July death came six months after she was found face down and unresponsive in a bathtub in her suburban Atlanta home.
“If I could have been here two days before, it wouldn’t have went down like that,” her father said in clips released ahead of the broadcast. The interview is scheduled to run on the talk show “The Real” on FOX stations, as well as on the BET cable network.
Brown’s death was eerily similar to that of her Grammy-winning mother, who drowned in a bathtub at a Beverly Hills hotel in 2012 at age 48.
Authorities have said cocaine abuse and heart disease contributed to the death of Houston, who had battled substance abuse. Bobbi Kristina was her only child.
In the interview, Brown said he had prayed for six months for a better outcome but that “when God calls you, he calls you.”
“I’m pretty sure her mother had a part in this, like, come on, let’s get her up here,” he said, suggesting that the pair would be together in heaven.
Conflicts among Bobbi Kristina Brown’s family and her close friends played out publicly during the months in which she was in a medically induced coma.
A court-appointed conservator for Brown, who inherited her mother’s fortune, has filed a civil lawsuit accusing her boyfriend, Nick Gordon, of causing her death. [ID: nL1N10I2NN]
A representative for Gordon could not immediately be reached for comment. No one has been criminally charged in the case.
(Reporting by Letitia Stein in Tampa, Fla.; Editing by Susan Heavey)
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