Maybe the spirit got the wrong person….?
That was the chilling question posed to a camera crew by worldwide pop star Lisa ‘Left Eye’ Lopes after the car she was travelling in killed a 10-year-old boy with an almost identical surname.
It was a tragic premonition. Two weeks later she was also dead.
The rapper was famous as a member of and creative force behind the globally popular band, TLC.
The three-piece sold tens of millions of records and won countless awards. As a solo artist she also had two US top ten singles as well as a UK number one.
(Image: Reuters)
Left Eye’s success – she got her nickname because her left eye slanted downwards more than her right – was even more remarkable as she came from an abusive home,
Her strict alcoholic father encouraged her to share his booze at a young age and by her late teens she had issues with the demon drink.
After she auditioned and got the role in TLC, the group quickly took off, their first album selling six million copies.
(Image: WireImage)
In 1993 she began dating Atlanta Falcons’ American Football player Andre Rison, and it wasn’t a quiet life.
She soon accused him of hitting her and, in another incident, after catching him in bed with another woman, she threw all the teddy bears he had bought her into a marble bath and set fire to them.
The bath was replaced with a fibreglass one.
After another row in 1994 she did the same trick, this time drenching his collection of trainers in lighter fluid before setting them alight.
Unfortunately, this time the bath went up in flames too, followed by most of the house.
She was arrested for arson and sentenced to five years of probation and a $10,000 fine.
She then began self-harming, carving the word love into her arm, and then the word hate.
Away from the booze and relationship problems, things in the band were also rocky.
Their album CrazySexyCool sold more than 23 million copies but Lopes had been in rehab for much of its creation.
(Image: Getty Images)
After their third album was released she began to publicly question her role in the band and a war of words broke about between her and the two other members.
She then began a number of solo projects, supporting other female bands and travelling to Honduras to do charity work.
On those trips she would also detox under the direction of a controversial guru named Dr Sebi, who also claimed he could cure AIDS with diet and homeopathic remedies.
It was in Honduras tragedy would ensue.
In April, 2002, Left Eye was a passenger in a car on one of the country’s unpaved, unlit roads when a boy called Bayron Lopez stepped out in front of their vehicle.
(Image: Reuters)
They rushed him to hospital, Left Eye cradling the dying boy’s bleeding head in her arms while someone else performed mouth to mouth resuscitation.
Tragically he died the next day. Lisa paid for his medical bills and funeral costs, even choosing his coffin.
She then told a film crew recording her trip that she felt a “spirit” following her and wondered if they had taken the wrong person as the boy’s name was so similar to hers.
Two weeks later her premonition came true.
(Image: Getty Images)
She was driving a rented Mitsubishi SUV when she swerved to avoid a truck and then an oncoming car.
The vehicle ploughed into some trees and rolled several times. Lisa and five others were thrown from the vehicle. She died instantly. She was just 30.
The tragedy was also caught on camera from inside the car.
Thousands of people attended her funeral and engraved on her casket were the lyrics she had sung on TLC’s smash hit Waterfalls – “dreams are hopeless aspirations, in hopes of coming true, believe in yourself, the rest is up to me and you.”
Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk
