Luke Bryan Clears Up ‘Misinformation’ About Sister’s ‘Tragic’ Cause of Death

Luke Bryan is speaking out about his sister Kelly Bryan’s death in 2007 at just 39 years old. 

His older sister was at home when she suddenly died.

Now, Bryan tells “All There Is with Anderson Cooper," “I’ve never really explained what happened to my sister. There’s some misinformation out there on the internet, and I think some people kind of wonder what happened and think that we’ve tried to cover it up.”

He went on, “But there is a very, very small percentage of people that die for no reason in the world. And it’s called sudden death syndrome and that’s essentially what they described my sister’s death as she was in her home doing her laundry, and it was Anderson, it was like, you know, somebody just turned the switch off on her and it was just tragic beyond words.”

It took a while to get answers, and Luke said, “Obviously, we wanted to know what had happened because there was so much, there was just so much unanswered questions. And we wanted to know, could there be a family history of something that her children might have or may have?”

He noted, "Your typical findings of an autopsy of someone 39 would be an aneurysm or an embolism or a blood clot of some kind and everything was inconclusive."

What they did know was, “She had a pretty severe, like, orbital bone injury. So, whether she fainted or not, I think she may have went into the floor and kind of knocked herself out. My nephew was 3 at the time.”

Bryan insisted, "I just think I think if someone could have been there, maybe, maybe her chances of surviving would have been — they would have been a lot better.”

Luke praised his sister, saying, “She really was everything in our lives. She was a mother of three children and she was, I mean, the best mother you could ever dream of. And we all leaned on her for so many things and it’s hard to really wrap your brain around her being gone.”

The last time he saw Kelly was days before her death when she bought 120 tickets on her credit card to the Grand Ole Opry so that Luke’s friends and family could see him perform there for the first time.

He told Anderson, "I never could have imagined that our last photo would have taken in the lobby of the Grand Ole Opry right after I had done... my first performance."

Seven years after Kelly died, her husband Ben Cheshire died of a heart attack. 

Luke and his wife Caroline, who are the parents of sons Bo, 17, and Tate,15, adopted their three kids Jordan, Kris and Tilde.

“It’s just what you do as family,” he said. “And I guess you go into a tribe instinct and you do what you can to kind of make it … But Til it wasn’t necessarily an adoption, more like we were, we had to sign paperwork that he’s our responsibility. And watching him come into our home and have to grieve the loss of his dad was really, really tough. And to watch my wife step up and do the work that she had to do was one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen.”