Aaron Carter's Estate Settles Claims With Walgreens and a Santa Monica Pharmacy
The estate of Aaron Carter has settled its wrongful death claims against Walgreens and Santa Monica Medical Plaza Pharmacy. Both pharmacies filled the singer's Xanax prescriptions before he died in 2022. The settlement was announced in a court filing on Thursday, October 15, and was first reported by Billboard.
A wrongful death claim is a lawsuit brought after a death, arguing that someone's careless or wrongful conduct caused it. Settling means both sides agree to end that part of the case without a trial. The amount paid and the other terms have not been made public.
Carter was 34 when he drowned in a bathtub. Drugs were in his system. Xanax is a prescription anti-anxiety medicine, and the case centres on how often and in what amounts it was prescribed to him.
Marc Lazo, the attorney for the Carter estate, told Billboard that the family is satisfied with the pharmacy settlements. The estate's earlier settlement came in May, when the Los Angeles psychiatry clinic that prescribed Xanax to Carter agreed to resolve part of the case. People reported that agreement at the time.
The lawsuit was filed in 2023 by Carter's former fiancée, on behalf of their young son. It alleges that a psychiatrist and a dentist overprescribed Xanax to Carter, and that pharmacies filled those prescriptions without checking for signs of abuse. The claims describe the prescriptions as excessively high and unreasonably frequent.
The defendants dispute that account. They maintain that Carter died from inhaling difluoroethane, a gas found in canisters of compressed air, and not from Xanax. They also argue that the amount of Xanax in his system was not enough to cause him to lose consciousness.
Claims remain open against Jason Mirabile, the dentist who prescribed Xanax to Carter. His trial against the estate is scheduled for early January. Mirabile's attorneys plan to argue that Carter was an absentee father, which they say would stop the son from recovering damages for lost financial support or companionship. They also want to call witnesses from the Department of Children and Family Services, the California agency that oversees child welfare.
Carter first became widely known as a child performer. His 2000 album, Aaron's Party (Come and Get It), reached No. 4 on the Billboard 200, the weekly US album chart that ranks the best-selling albums. The case now moving through the courts concerns his death, and a child who will have to live with the outcome of it.
Because the trial against Mirabile is still months away, the court's final findings on the cause of death have not been reached. The lawsuit's allegations and the defendants' denials stand as the positions of each side.
