Death
On September 22, 2011, Williams was found dead in a hotel room in El Segundo, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. According to the county coroner's office, Williams was found dead at 6:15 p.m. A Los Angeles County Coroner's Office spokesperson stated that the following autopsy did not yield a cause of death. In late December 2011, the family released this statement, through a family friend singer/producer Norwood Young, reporting her official cause of death: "Following three months of intensive coroner's autopsy and toxicology research, it has been definitively determined that the cause of death for our beloved Vesta was 'natural death' from 'hypertensive heart disease,'" adding: "An enlarged heart can remain undetected for many years."
Vesta Williams was laid to rest at Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Hollywood Hills) on Octoder 4th, 2011 following the memorial service at West Angeles Church of God in Christ in Los Angeles, California. Attendees included notable friends Wanda Dee, singer Peggi Blu, Freda Payne, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Loretta Devine, Kellita Smith, Norwood Young, Michael Collier (author), Miki Howard, Karel Bouley, Kiki Shepard, Jackee’, Luenell and renowned Blues singer, Linda Hopkins. A private reception was held following the interment.
She is survived by her mother, daughter, three sisters, a brother and three grandchildren as well as many cousins, friends and fans.
Read more about this topic: Vesta Williams
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“It is better to sit down than to stand, it is better to lie down than to sit, but death is the best of all.”
—Indian proverb, quoted in Sébastien-roch Nicolas de Chamfort, Maxims and Considerations, vol. 1, no. 155 (1796, trans. 1926)
“I never can hear a crowd of people singing and gesticulating, all together, at an Italian opera, without fancying myself at Athens, listening to that particular tragedy, by Sophocles, in which he introduces a full chorus of turkeys, who set about bewailing the death of Meleager.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1845)
“for it is not so much to know the self
as to know it as it is known
by galaxy and cedar cone,
as if birth had never found it
and death could never end it:”
—Archie Randolph Ammons (b. 1926)