Update May 16, 3:56 p.m. ET:
The Wilmette Police Department issued a press release this afternoon stating that Sinéad O’Connor has been found and is safe. No further details were given at the time.
Sinéad O’Connor has been reported missing after failing to return after taking her bike for a ride early yesterday morning in the Chicago suburb of Wilmette.
The singer, who has a long history with mental illness, may be suicidal.
“O’Connor reportedly left the Wilmette area for a bicycle ride yesterday at 6 a.m. and has not returned,” the Wilmette Police Department said. “A caller expressed concern for her well-being and no other information is available at this time.”
The 49-year-old was wearing all black (a parka, leather pants and a sweatshirt with “Ireland” on the back) when she took a Raleigh motorized bicycle with a pink basket for a ride Sunday.
O’Connor has made several attempts to kill herself over the years, including in 1999 on her 33rd birthday, in 2012 and just last fall after being depressed by custody battles with two of her exes for her two youngest sons.
Last summer she canceled a tour because she was “suffering from exhaustion due to an existing not resolved medical situation.”
O’Connor, who often writes controversial and angry rants on social media, posted an odd message on Facebook yesterday at 9:12 a.m. directed at her oldest son Jake in which she said that Jake and her ex Donal Lunny brought her son with Lunny, Shane, into Tulsa illegally. “Do not abandon your brother or any other of my babies again,” she said to Jake. “What you have done to your brother and your mother is LITERALLY criminal.”
The Irish musician made headlines earlier this month after she said that Prince - who wrote her biggest hit, “Nothing Compares 2 U” - “got his drugs over the decades” from comedian Arsenio Hall. Hall then filed a $5 million defamation lawsuit against her in which he said she’s a “desperate, attention-seeker” who is “now known perhaps as much for her bizarre, unhinged Internet rants as for her music.”
