By Beatriz Colon

Copyright hellomagazine

Tina Turner and Ike Turner’s son, Ike Turner Jr. has died. He was 67. TMZ was first to report the news; the legendary “What’s Love Got to Do with It” singer’s niece, Jacqueline Bullock, confirmed news of Turner Jr.’s passing, from kidney failure, which came one day after his 67th birthday. Turner Jr. was Ike’s son with Lorraine Taylor, with whom he also shared Michael Turner, born in 1959, however Tina adopted both early in their childhood, and raised them even past her divorce from Ike in 1978.

Jacqueline further told TMZ that Turner Jr. had battled severe heart issues for years, and his health had been declining for some time, especially after suffering from a stroke in early September.

Though he briefly worked as a sound engineer for his adoptive mother, he lived a largely private life, and little is known about his personal and family life, or whether he is survived by a partner or any children.

When Tina married Ike, who was notoriously abusive towards her, in Tijuana, Mexico in 1962, she was already a mother to Craig Raymond Turner, born in 1958 out of her relationship with former Kings of Rhythm member Raymond Hill; he passed away in 2018 aged 55 from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The former couple’s first and only biological son, Ronnie Turner, was born in 1960, and he passed away in December of 2022 from complications of colon cancer.

Tina, who passed away in May 2023, and Ike, who passed away in 2007, found fame together in the 1960s — their first R&B hit was “A Fool in Love” in 1960 — though behind the scenes, the story wasn’t so sparkling. “My relationship with Ike was doomed the day he figured out I was going to be his moneymaker,” she wrote in her 2018 memoir, My Love Story, where she also recalled Ike forcing her to change her last name against her will.

As the musical pair’s fame and success began to grow, so did Ike’s abuse towards Tina, which she famously recounted in both of her memoirs. She said of her ex-husband: “First, he was verbally abusive. Then, he picked up a wooden shoe stretcher,” adding: “Ike knew what he was doing.” She also said in a 2021 HBO documentary about her life, Tina, that she was “living a life of death,” referring to the abuse she endured throughout their 16 years of marriage amid Ike’s growing drug addiction.

Tina finally fled from Ike in 1976, after a blow-out fight en route to a Dallas hotel, when she ran off with no money and bloodied clothes, and sought shelter at a Ramada Inn across the highway. She later found success without him and earned the title Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll thanks to her 1984 album Private Dancer, not only a departure from the R&B hits she released with her ex-husband, but a symbolic departure from the life she had with him.

Eventually, Tina found real love with music executive Erwin Bach, who she was with for 27 years. They met at an airport in Germany in 1985, after her manager at the time asked him to pick her up, and married in 2013. It was an outstandingly different love than that of what she had with Ike (if you can call it love) and he even went so far as to donate a kidney to her when she struggled with kidney disease. She was “overwhelmed by the enormity of his offer,” she wrote in her memoir.