Last week, police found the body of Michael Cavallari – the brother of reality star Kristin Cavallari – in a remote desert in Utah.
Cavallari had been reported missing almost two weeks prior, and family and friends began to fear the worst after investigators found his car abandoned by the side of a highway with the motor still running.
According to a coroner’s report obtained by TMZ, Cavallari died from exposure to the elements. (Temperatures in the that part of Utah dipped into the teens several times in the days after the 30-year-old left his car.)
But while the cause of death has been determined, many questions remain about the series of events that led up to Cavallari’s disappearance.
Just before he fled Los Angeles, Cavallari was arrested for allegedly threatening a woman with a gun.
Now, his friends and neighbors tell Radar Online that Cavallari’s troubling behavior didn’t end there.
“I remember a few times we’d see him ranting in the back yard, shouting that the CIA was coming to get him,” says a man who lived near Michael in the housing complex owned by Cavallari’s father.
“He seemed paranoid, completely out of it.”
Another tenant remembers Cavallari’s seemingly constant drinking and hair-trigger temper:
“Michael would come over early in the morning, around 7am, and ask me if I wanted to drink a beer with him, which was a little odd,” the man says. “When I refused he’d get mad.”
Sadly, those who were closest to Cavallari confirm that he struggled with drugs and alcohol throughout his short life.
He briefly moved to Las Vegas to try to escape his demons in 2014, but returned to Southern California earlier this year.
Sources say Cavallari was kicked out of the rental property owned by his father just days before his disappearance.
