No signs of trauma or suicide in Prince’s death

Authorities have ruled out that Prince committed suicide, following a four-hour autopsy on the iconic musician’s body on Friday.

“There was no sign of violence,” Carver County Sheriff Jim Olson said at a Friday afternoon news conference. “Investigators have no reason to believe it was suicide. The rest of it is under investigation.”

He said that full results of the autopsy could take several weeks, and that it was not unusual for Prince to be the only person in his residence.

Prince, 57, was found dead in a lift on his Paisley Park estate on Thursday. He was last seen at around 8pm on Wednesday and was found unconscious in the lift by some his staff around 9:30 the following morning.

He had been rushed to hospital in Illinois six days earlier, while flying home from a concert in Georgia, but was treated and discharged a few hours later.

US entertainment news site TNC cited unnamed sources as saying that the singer had been treated for an overdose of the painkiller drug Percocet.

Medical examiner Martha Weaver declined to give details of the preliminary findings, but said that a full set of tests would be carried out on Prince’s body involving tissue and blood samples.

The Associated Press reported that Prince had hip trouble and had spoken about struggling with childhood epilepsy,

His former percussionist, Sheila E, told the news agency that Prince had suffered the effects of years of jumping off risers and speakers on stage while wearing high heels.

"There was always something kind of bothering him, as it does all of us," she said. "I hurt every single day. You know we're like athletes, we train, and we get hurt all the time. We have so many injuries."