R&B singer David Ruffin died from a cocaine overdose today (June 1, 1991).
David Ruffin had rented a limousine with a man named Donald Brown the previous day, on May 31st.
The two men ended up going on a drug binge in a West Philadelphia crack house, in the early morning hours of June 1.
According to Brown, they smoked an enormous intake of crack cocaine during a short period of time.
Police said David Ruffin and Donald Brown shared 10 vials of crack cocaine in the crack house in less than one hour, when Ruffin collapsed.
An unknown person drove David Ruffin to the hospital in a limousine around 3:00 am, where he died at University of Penn Hospital.
David Ruffin’s problems with the drug dated back to the mid-60’s, when he was treated for cocaine addiction, in 1967.
He left The Temptations for a solo career in 1968 and hit big almost a year later, with the single “My Whole World Ended (The Moment You Left Me).”
But David Ruffin could not get back on the charts until 1975, when he hit with the single “Walk Away From Love.”
During the dry spell, David Ruffin was arrested twice on cocaine possession charges and was in another rehab facility center from October of 1989 until November of 1989.
Tragically, police on found $53 in David Ruffin’s pockets, although an estimated $40,000 was stolen from him.
The missing money raised questions surrounding the famous singer’s death.
“Something is just not right here. I don’t know if David overdosed, or if someone overdosed him, but the money is gone,” his fiancé Dianne Showers complained.
“When I heard the news I was, like most people who knew David, saddened but hardly surprised,” Temptations founding group member Otis Williams said of David Ruffin’s death.
“Drugs had been a part of David’s life for as long as I’d known him. He had first gone into rehabilitation in the late 1960s,” Williams continued. “Though he was in and out of rehab several times over the years, the drugs always seem to lure him back.
The FBI had to do a check of Ruffin’s fingerprints in order to identify the famous singer, who was just 50-years-old, when he was when he died in 1991.
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