Aaron Carter was looking frail and "extremely tired" just two days before his untimely death, his manager said.
"He looked thin," Taylor Helgeson told Page Six. "He just looked like he needed to be doing anything but working. He looked like he needed to be taking care of him."
Although nothing has been confirmed, it seems that the "I Want Candy" singer's addictions caught up with him, as a report claims he was surrounded by pill bottles and compressed air cans. Prior to the death, there had been suspicions that Aaron was huffing compressed air to get high.
Despite his "tired" guise, Aaron was in good spirits and working on new music in the studio the week of his passing. Still, Aaron's manager — who'd been woking with him for eight months — was perplexed by the difference in the singer's attitude and appearance.
"He didn't seem okay," Taylor said before explaining, "Now, when I say that, I think it's really important to kind of context that. He didn't seem okay physically … [but] mentally, he was the most excited I've seen him in months. He was very intelligent and he was very conscious of what people wanted to see from him."
The "House of Carter" alum was also flirtatious in his dwindling hours, as he was apparently begging model Sonya Cruz to come to his house. "You should see me soon… ASAP… like tomorrow… my place," he wrote in a series of messages according to screengrabs published by the Daily Mail. He even offered to pay for an Uber to get Sonya to his Lancaster, Calif., home that evening. Sonya relented, writing, "talk tomorrow after you get up." Aaron, who had an on-and-off relationship with fiancé Melanie Martin, would not wake up again.
Since Aaron's body was found in the bathtub by a housekeeper, rumors pertaining to the cause of death have swirled, but Taylor is convinced that it accidental.
"He was a guy with a lot of plans," the manager said. "We had so much stuff going on and, you know, Aaron was a really prideful guy in his own right, too."
Of course, that's not to say Aaron didn't have issues. Far from it. In fact, Taylor told Page Six that he and Aaron were at odds over the singer's resistance to go to an inpatient rehab program in Utah.
"We were proposing [what] would have been … three months in Utah just on detoxing and kind of formulating new physical habits within your body," the manager said. "Aaron was saying, 'I'm going to get my kid back and then I'm going to do this,' and I was saying, 'If you do this, I'm definitely going to get you your kid back,' and that was the disagreement."
In September, Aaron and Melanie lost custody of their son, due to domestic violence and drug-use concerns, the Los Angeles Times reported. However, in trying to regain custody, Aaron did opt for treatment, but it was an out-patient program near his home, which is less-stringent than the Utah program. Further, his attendance record wasn't admirable, as he reportedly skipped several dates. Aaron, TMZ said, stopped going to treatment sessions briefly, but was reinstated just before his last breath.
Ironically, in September, Aaron had told a paparazzo that he'd been sober for five years, something that few people believed, particularly due to his appearance. Before the 34-year-old's death, Aaron's longtime friend Gary Madatyan told ET, "He looked terrible. He lost so much weight. He was not acting normal. His mind was not there. I heard he's taking a lot of medication, not specifically illegal drugs, but he was on a lot of medication."
In his final days, Aaron was often thinking about his son, Prince, and was determined to make a good life for him, Taylor said.
"I was like, 'You need a will,' so I reached out to my publicist at that time, and I had asked her to help with getting the paperwork," the manager says. "And so we started getting that together and we got the paperwork out and it never got signed. It never got filled out."