Past America’s Got Talent winner Neal E. Boyd has died. The opera singer was only 42 years old.
Boyd — who won season 3 of the reality TV show in 2008 — passed away on Sunday, June 10, from heart failure at his home around 6 p.m. in the evening, the Scott County Coroner tells Us Weekly, adding that “there will be no autopsy as he had a documented health condition specifically related to his heart.”
Boyd was set to release his third album in 2019 inspired by a tragic car accident in 2017 that left him and his mother severely injured.
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Boyd opened up about the accident in an interview with Southeast Missourian earlier this year. “It was a very, very, very bad wreck … It’s a very slow progress. I shattered a lot of bones, and shattered my hip, which has left me almost unable to use that leg for now,” he told the outlet in February. “It’s been difficult, because you can’t get up on stage right now, you can’t perform for the audiences and you can’t really do too much recording or traveling.”
He added that the album’s title, In the Middle of it All, is “kind of how I feel right now.” He continued: “I’m in the middle of it all. I have a lot of rehab left to do. We have to be able to get me back up on my feet again, because I’m still walking with a walker.”
The Missouri native noted that “it just feels like something great is about to happen once I get back on my feet and back in front of the audience again.”
“You never know what’s going to happen next,” he said. “Just be grateful that you survived.”