The result—no prison time for the killing of one of the most celebrated musicians in the world—produced a response that ranged from resigned acceptance to outrage. For Gaye’s fans and many in the music industry, it felt like an inadequate accounting for the loss of an irreplaceable creative voice.
Alberta Gay’s response to Gay Sr.’s courtroom statements—her observation that her husband had not been apologetic initially, that the remorse came later, when the weight of legal consequences was upon him—added a layer of complexity that the sentencing itself did not resolve.
Gay Sr. was barred from owning firearms or consuming alcohol for the remainder of his life. He moved, in approximately 1986, to a nursing home in Inglewood. He died there, or in a subsequent nursing home in Culver City, of pneumonia on October 10, 1998.
He was 84 years old.
He had outlived his son by fourteen years.
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THE MEMORIAL AND THE PUBLIC GRIEF
The memorial events that followed Marvin Gaye’s death were extraordinary in scale and intensity.
At Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale on April 5, 1984, more than 10,000 people came to pay their respects. The crowd was composed of people from across the spectrum of American life—fans who had grown up with his music in the 1960s, people who had been young when “What’s Going On” was released, teenagers who knew him from “Sexual Healing.” They came from different ages, different backgrounds, different relationships to his music. They came because they felt, in his death, a loss that was personal even though most of them had never met him.