Bobby Brown and Kim Ward's 28-year-old son Bobby Brown Jr was found dead in his Los Angeles home on November 19, 2020. Ward gave birth to Brown Jr (the second of her two children with Brown) less than a year before Brown and Whitney Houston had their daughter Bobbi Kristina. Reports say officers with the Los Angeles Police Department rushed to a "medical emergency" at the home in Encino, California at 1:50 pm on Wednesday. A source told TMZ that officials "do not believe there was foul play involved", but that officers are still investigating at the property. In a statement to CNN, Nick Szatmari, the agent for Brown senior, said he had "no comment" regarding the death. Bobby Jr is the second child that the R&B singer has lost after the death of his daughter, Bobbi Kristina, who was found unconscious in a bathtub in 2015 at the age of 22.
Three days after Bobbi Kristina's death in 2015, Bobby Jr, also an aspiring musician, spoke out on Twitter about people who flocked to follow him. He tweeted, "People really don’t give a f**k about you unless you’re relevant and they don’t love you till you’re famous or gone. I don’t want these follows. Your follows ain’t gonna fill the hole in my heart, and y'all gon unfollow me once you stop caring." The tweet has since been deleted.
Who is Kim Ward?
Kim Ward has known Brown since the time they were around 12. In those days, he was an 11-year-old nobody competing in local talent shows. “At that time he probably wasn’t the cutest,” Ward told Boston Magazine in 2006, recalling their courtship. “There was something about him I just wanted.”
Beirout Cummings, godmother to Brown’s son, said, “Kim was the person who kept Bobby grounded,” adding, “She never cared about his money. If they got in an argument, she would cuss him out, whereas everybody else around him became yes-men.” But, his mother, Carol Brown, was allegedly not too happy with the relationship. “His mother had a lot of say-so,” Sabrina Johnson, who was in the same dance troupe as Ward, told the magazine. “His family, because of Kim’s influence in his life and because of the relationship and bond she had with him, they tried everything they could to break that up.” Cummings agreed. “His mom didn’t want him with Kim,” she says. “Kim had influence with him, and that was threatening to her.”
Ward and Brown had an 11-year long on-and-off affair, but even before she found out about his fling with Whitney Houston, their relationship was filled with worry. After the couple gave birth to LaPrincia in 1989, Brown attended Houston’s 26th birthday party at her New Jersey home and everything changed.
How did the love story end?
Presenting a new aspect of their bond, the article went on to say, “She had loved him when he met Whitney Houston and even when he married her, and though 12 years have passed since then, and she denies it today, it’s easy to believe that she loves him still. And, she says, he is still in love with her.”
Talking about Houston, Kim told the magazine, “I feel like the only thing Whitney had over me was a pretty smile; she had that nice set of teeth,” adding, “I was a little bit younger then. I’m 36 now, so that’s how I felt. [I wasn’t] thinking about her money, her power, I didn’t know none of that. I wasn’t thinking about her credibility.” While Kim gave birth to their son Bobby Jr, Brown married Houston in 1992.
“Why did he get married? The pressure,” Ward said. “It probably was the pressure from his family and from his friends. I mean, she was so big then.” However, Brown's mother Carol denied it saying, “That is so far from the truth...” She added, “If he had married somebody nobody knew — say, Kim — I would have been just as happy. I’m not starstruck, okay?” Ward also claimed Houston refused to warm to Bobby Jr even though she was kind to his older sister, LaPrincia, confessing, “She had a problem with little Bobby.”
