Claude Lemieux allegedly admitted he had relapsed after 12 years of sobriety the night before he died by suicide, according to an incident report obtained by TMZ Sports. The new detail puts the final hours of his death in sharper focus, linking a family confrontation, a late-night departure from the home and a message found on his phone.
The report says Lemieux's family had noticed changes in his behavior over the past year, and Deborah confronted him after seeing that shift. After he allegedly acknowledged the relapse, she told him to leave the home at 10:30 p.m. ET and called Brendan, who came to the residence to talk about how they could support him. Brendan then checked his father's location, saw he was at the business, drove there, spotted Claude Lemieux's Ford truck in the parking lot and removed a firearm from the glove box.
Roughly five hours later, Brendan found his father hanging in the family's furniture store. The report does not say what was on the message found on Lemieux's phone, but that unanswered detail now hangs over the rest of the account. What it does make clear is that the night turned from concern to crisis in a matter of hours.
The account also lands against the backdrop of Lemieux's long NHL career, which began with the Montreal Canadiens and included four Stanley Cups, a Conn Smythe Trophy and 1,215 NHL games before he retired in 2009. He had appeared at Montreal's Bell Centre for Game 3 of the Eastern Conference Final just days before his death, and was honored at the Colorado Avalanche's 30th anniversary celebration of the 1995-1996 season before the game against the Florida Panthers at Ball Arena in Denver, Colorado, on Dec. 11, 2025. The Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office had not immediately responded to an inquiry, leaving the report's final unanswered question in place: what the phone message meant in the hours before Brendan found him.
