The singer was left heartbroken following the incident in 1991
Legendary musician Eric Clapton made a heartbreaking promise just 24 hours before his four-year-old son’s tragic death.
The 80-year-old My Father’s Eyes singer has won 18 Grammy Awards, is the only three-time inductee in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and has sold over 100 million albums around the world.
While he’s known for inspiring people for the better through his music, Eric has suffered tragedy away from the stage.
Fans were left devastated upon learning that on March 20, 1991, Eric’s four-year-old son Conor lost his life after falling from the 53rd-floor window of a New York City apartment.
Eric had Conor with his Italian actress and model ex-girlfriend Lory del Santo, while he was still married to Pattie Boyd, in 1986.
Lory took custody of Conor following her and Eric’s split, with the singer arriving at their apartment to bring Conor to the circus at Nassau Coliseum on Long Island.
After taking his son out for the first time on his own, Eric promised Lory that he was going to be ‘a proper father’ to Conor moving forward.
His biographer Philip Norman wrote: “That sawdust-scented afternoon showed him what he’d been missing. When they returned to the apartment, with Conor chattering excitedly about the clowns and elephants, Eric told Lory that, from now on, he intended to be a proper father.”
On a day where Eric was planning to take Conor to the Bronx Zoo and have lunch with his son at an Italian restaurant, tragedy occurred.
“In the morning, as mother and son waited for Clapton to pick Conor up from the apartment, a janitor arrived to clean the windows. Lory was in the bathroom and the boy was in the care of a nanny – but careering around in a state of high excitement, impatient to see his ‘Papa’ again.
“The janitor had been working on the cantilevered windows in the living room, one of which still hung open.
“He called out to the nanny to watch the child, but before she could react, Conor dashed past her, jumped up onto the low window-ledge where he’d normally press his nose against the glass to gaze out – and disappeared,” writer Philip said.
After his relationship with Lory, who he was engaged to, ended in 1991, Eric began seeing Italian film producer Silvio Sardi, who owned the apartment Conor died in.
With Lory ringing Eric to break the news to him, all he could say in response was ‘are you sure’, before walking seven blocks to the apartment to make sure his worst fear wasn’t coming true.
Reflecting on the incident, Eric later told PEOPLE: “I remember putting the phone down and calmly walking from my hotel to that place as if nothing happened.
“And I walked past the street and, this is a terrible thing of shame for me, which I’ll never, ever perhaps recover from and seeing that, seeing a crowd of people and a paramedic van and knowing that he was there [trying to be resuscitated] and walking by.
“I’ll punish myself forever about why didn’t I run? Why didn’t I go to see him? … the truth is I couldn’t. I was so frightened.”
Conor’s funeral was held two days before Eric’s 46th birthday on March 28 at St Mary Magdalen in Ripley, Surrey, with George Harrison and Phil Collins among the attendees.
Turning to music to help him overcome the death of his son, Eric released Tears in Heaven in 1992, which remains his best-selling single in the United States to this day.
