ATLANTA — The family of a longtime guitarist for the rock group 3 Doors Down is accusing an Alabama doctor of fueling the musician's opioid addiction before he died of a drug overdose.
Authorities say 38-year-old Matthew Roberts was found dead in August 2016 in the hallway of a hotel outside Milwaukee, where he was to perform in a charity concert.
In a lawsuit filed recently in Alabama, Roberts' family says Dr. Richard Snellgrove began prescribing high levels of opioids to the musician in 2006 and continued doing so until days before he died, a decade later.
Other defendants named in the lawsuit include Rite Aid pharmacies, which the family said failed to report Roberts' suspected drug abuse.
Lawyers for Snellgrove and a representative of the Pennsylvania-based pharmacy company didn't immediately return phone and email messages Thursday.
Roberts co-authored the band's hit song “Kryptonite,” which in 2001 was nominated for a Grammy award for best rock song.
On Aug. 20, 2016, Roberts was found dead in the hallway of a Hampton Inn in West Bend, Wisconsin, with a guitar case next to him and a patch that delivers the opioid fentanyl on his body, a special agent with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration wrote in an affidavit. A medical examiner later ruled the cause of death to be an overdose involving fentanyl, hydrocodone and alprazolam, the affidavit stated.
