How did Chester Bennington die? Let’s want to know: Nine years ago today, on July 20, 2017, music fans around the world woke up to news they weren’t ready for. Chester Bennington, the voice behind some of the biggest rock anthems of the 2000s, had died at his home in Palos Verdes Estates, California. He was 41.

Bennington was born in Phoenix, Arizona, on March 20, 1976, and grew up in a house that wasn’t always easy. His parents divorced when he was young, and he later spoke openly about childhood struggles that shaped a lot of what he eventually wrote about. Music became his outlet early on, first with a local Arizona band called Grey Daze, before he got the call that would change everything: an audition for a new band out of Los Angeles that would become Linkin Park.

That was the year 2000. Linkin Park’s debut album, Hybrid Theory, didn’t just do well; it became the best-selling rock album of the entire decade, eventually going diamond. Songs like “In the End” and “Crawling” turned Bennington’s voice, that ability to move from a soft melodic verse to a full-throated scream within seconds, into one of the most recognizable sounds in rock music. The band would go on to sell more than 50 million records worldwide.

He didn’t stop at Linkin Park. Between 2013 and 2015, he stepped in as the touring frontman for Stone Temple Pilots after Scott Weiland’s departure, and he also led a side project called Dead by Sunrise. Musicians who worked with him often mention the same thing: how much he genuinely loved music, not as a career, but as something close to survival.

That’s part of what makes his death so hard for fans to separate from the timing of it. Bennington died on what would have been the 53rd birthday of his close friend Chris Cornell, the Soundgarden frontman who had taken his own life just two months earlier, in May 2017. Bennington had sung at Cornell’s funeral. Friends say the loss hit him harder than most people around him realized.

He had talked about his mental health before, more than once. In a radio interview just months before he died, he admitted, “I have a hard time with life,” a line that reads very differently now than it did at the time. Depression had followed him for years, something he’d been open about even during periods when things seemed to be going well.

In October 2017, Linkin Park’s surviving members organized a tribute concert at the Hollywood Bowl, bringing together artists from Blink-182 to System of a Down to perform his parts and honor his memory. The band went quiet for years afterward. It wasn’t until 2024 that Linkin Park returned with new material and a new vocalist, something that would have been unthinkable to fans in the immediate aftermath of his death.

Nine years on, Bennington’s voice is still what people reach for when a Linkin Park song comes on, still the sound that defined a specific, angsty era of early-2000s rock for millions of listeners. That’s not a small thing to leave behind.

If you or someone you know is struggling, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 by calling or texting 988 in the United States.

Many fans still search for this question nine years later. Chester Bennington died on July 20, 2017, at his home in Palos Verdes Estates, California, at age 41. The Los Angeles County Coroner’s office confirmed his death was a suicide. It came just two months after his close friend, Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell, died the same way and on what would have been Cornell’s 53rd birthday. Bennington had spoken publicly about his struggles with depression in the months before his death, a battle many of his fans only fully understood afterward.

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