JOHN McAfee "didn't say goodbye to family" before his reported suicide, and an autopsy was ordered despite "no evidence of foul play."
A court spokeswoman for the Catalonia region said that a forensic team would need to perform toxicology tests on McAfee’s body to determine the cause of death and that results could take "days or weeks."
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Authorities have said that everything at the scene indicated that the 75-year-old tycoon killed himself.
The judicial investigation is being handled by a court in Martorell, a town northwest of Barcelona with jurisdiction over the prison where McAfee died.
McAfee’s Spanish lawyer, Javier Villalba, said the entrepreneur’s death had come as a surprise to his wife and other relatives, adding he would seek to get “to the bottom” of his client’s death.
"This has been like pouring cold water on the family and on his defense team," Villalba told The Associated Press on Thursday. "Nobody expected it, he had not said goodbye."
News of McAfee's death comes after:
- He was charged over a $13million cryptocurrency "scam"
- His controversial moments were revealed
- McAfee was arrested in Spain over "multi-million dollar tax evasion"
- He claimed he had "dirt on those in power" that he threatened to expose if he died
Although Villalba said that he had no evidence of any foul play, he blamed the death on "the cruelty of the system" for keeping a 75-year-old behind bars for economic and not blood-related crimes after judges refused to release him on bail.
"We had managed to nullify seven of the 10 counts he was accused of and even so he was still that dangerous person who could be fleeing Spain if he was released?" the lawyer said. "He was a world eminence, where could he hide?"
Spain’s National Court on Monday ruled that McAfee should be extradited to the US to face charges for evading more than $4million in the fiscal years 2016 to 2018.
The judge dropped seven of the 10 counts in the initial indictment.
Villalba said that McAfee had learned about the ruling shortly after on Monday and that his death on Wednesday didn’t come in the heat of the moment.
He also said that the legal team had been preparing with him an appeal to avoid being extradited.
A penitentiary source told AP that McAfee was sharing a cell in the Brians 2 jail where he had been put in preventive detention since he was arrested in October last year on a US warrant, but that at the moment of his death he had been alone.
Prosecutors in Tennessee accused McAfee of failing to report income from promoting cryptocurrencies while he did consulting work, earnings made in speaking engagements and for selling the rights to his life story for a documentary.
The criminal charges carried a prison sentence of up to 30 years.
The British-born entrepreneur led an eccentric life after selling his stake in the antivirus software company named after him in the early 1990s. He twice made long-shot runs for the US presidency.
McAfee often professed his love for drugs and guns in public remarks. And some of his actions landed him in legal trouble beyond Tennessee, from Central America to the Caribbean.
In 2012, he was sought for questioning in connection with the murder of his neighbor in Belize, but was never charged with a crime.
If you or someone you know is affected by any of the issues raised in this story, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-TALK (8255) or text Crisis Text Line at 741741.
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