Slayer’s Jeff Hanneman is dead at 49, and this is already very sad, no matter if you are or aren’t fan of trash metal! 49 is a very young age to die.
According to doctors, Hanneman died of liver failure, and when I read this, I first made the cliché connection, drug (alcohol) and rock’n’roll, but how wrong I was! Hanneman had Necrotizing fascilitis, the flesh-eating disease due to a bacteria, that he might have caught by a spider bite!! What? Such a thing can only happen to trash metal people. This is a horror movie right there, in one sentence! The poor guy had been sick since 2011, and he had already lost most of his arm, was placed in a medically-induced coma, got a series of skin grafts and was actually slowly recovering, but things went really wrong.
The band had posted this on May 1st on Slayer website:
‘As you know, Jeff was bitten by a spider more than a year ago, but what you may not have known was that for a couple of days after he went to the ER, things were touch-and-go. There was talk that he might have to have his arm amputated, and we didn’t know if he was going to pull through at all. He was in a medically-induced coma for a few days and had several operations to remove the dead and dying tissue from his arm. So, understand, he was in really, really bad shape…’
This is such a horrible death, I mean do not google pictures of it unless you have a very strong stomach: imagine the flesh-eating bacteria slowly destroying your muscles, fat, skin and deep tissues and the only way to save your life is to remove the diseased tissues. Nevertheless the spider bite is a very strange one, and sounds a little fishy?
Of course, considering where Hanneman comes from, considering the blasphemy signature of Slayer’s lyrics – this is a band who released the album ‘God hates us all’ to name only one – it didn’t take long for die-hard religious people and judgmental Christians to condemn the guy, and a famous church that I will not name, because they already get too much publicity, tweeted ‘Which of your idols will God kill next?’… according to the fans’ answers, they actually could be the next dead ones if they dare to protest at Slayer’s Jeff Hanneman’s funerals.