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Jun 22, 2016 By Joshua M. Miller Prince

Judith Hill, a Grammy-winning artist and Prince protégé who was one of two other passengers on the plane when they had to land the plane to make an emergency landing to get Prince help, has opened up to the New York Times about the moment. The event happened six days before Prince’s fatal fentanyl overdose. Hill says in the interview thatshe might have thought he’d simply fallen asleep, had she not been looking at his face. “His eyes fixed,” she said, before he nodded off. She immediately alerted the other passenger, Prince’s friend and aide Kirk Johnson. “We knew it was only a matter of time; we had to get down,” she said. “We didn’t have anything on the plane to help him.” After the emergency landing, paramedics gave Prince a shot of Narcan, which is typically used to treat opioid overdoses. After the ordeal, he was “very cooperative that whole night” and “serious about getting help,” Hill said.

On his hospital bed, Prince told Hill: ‘It’s only by God’s grace that I’m even here. I had to fight for my life. I remember hearing your voices from afar and saying to myself, “Follow the voices, follow the voices, get back in your body, you gotta to do this.” And he said it was the hardest thing he’d ever done, to get back into his body like that.”