Judith Hill, a protégée of the late Prince, shared details of the emergency plane landing incident just six days before the music legend’s untimely death. Hill sat down exclusively with the New York Times and gave readers a glimpse of the Prince’s final days.
Hill, a singer and songwriter from Los Angeles, Calif., was on a plane with Prince on April 15 en route to Minneapolis after a pair of shows in Atlanta. In her talk with the Times, Hill explained that Prince and his friend and aide Kirk Johnson were the only passengers on the private jet. It appears that the conversation between Hill and Prince was relatively normal before the singer lost consciousness and sparked the need for the emergency landing.
From the Times:
According to flight-tracking reports, the chartered 1988 Dassault Falcon 900 took off at 12:51 a.m. from Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport and was near Chicago, less than an hour from its destination, when Ms. Hill witnessed Prince fall unconscious. If she had glanced away in that instant, down at her phone or purse, she might have thought he had simply dozed off. “Thankfully, I happened to be looking into his face,” she said.
She immediately got Mr. Johnson, who was near the front of the plane. And when they couldn’t rouse Prince, they alerted the pilot, who called air traffic controllers in Chicago for help at 1:12 a.m., reporting an unresponsive man on board. “We knew it was only a matter of time; we had to get down,” Ms. Hill said. “We didn’t have anything on the plane to help him.”
Ms. Hill was “very freaked out,” she said, as they kept trying to wake him, shaking him and calling his name, while the plane descended. At 1:17 a.m., it made an emergency landing in Moline, Ill., where an ambulance met them. Paramedics and Mr. Johnson carried Prince, 57, into the vehicle, and he was revived on the tarmac with a shot of Narcan, which is typically used to treat opioid overdoses. Eighteen minutes after landing, the ambulance took him to nearby Trinity Moline Hospital.
Unbeknownst to Hill and the rest of the world, Prince’s reported use of painkillers contributed to the medical episode and not symptoms of the flu as originally reported. And as close as Hill was to Prince in musical collaboration and friendship, she was unaware of his use of painkillers.
Hill, who had lots of support from her mentor, has worked alongside the likes of the late Michael Jackson and comes from a family of musicians. In 2013, she was a contestant on NBC’s The Voice. She is currently on an East Coast tour.
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