Howie D Talks About His Sister Caroline’s Death

Backstreet Boys star Howie Dorough chatted with YM.com about his nonprofit foundation for the study, cure, and treatment of lupus after his sister Caroline died from the disease in 1998. Howie talked about the shock he felt when he found out that his sister had died saying, “I had literally just seen her, she’d come to a Backstreet Boys concert with her friends – she even had her doctor come out, from Duke University. I knew she was ill at that point – she’d had problems because she was coughing so much, she wasn’t getting enough oxygen. She was having seizures, too, but she came to a concert anyway, and when I talked to her doctor, he didn’t really even seem that concerned. The next week, I was in California doing the MTV Awards. We’d just won an award, and my brother called to say congratulations, but also that Caroline was worse. We’d had another concert planned, but my tour manager just let me go. My brother met me at the airport in Florida and told me she’d had a blackout, but they got her to come back and she was laughing and joking and back to normal. But when I got to the hospital they’d lost her again; they were trying to resuscitate her, and I remember watching them beat on her chest. We were praying, but she didn’t come back.”