Towards the end of April 2002, Price was off work for a week with an acute ear infection. He died of heart failure on the night of 21 April 2002 caused by meningoencephalitis – an 'extremely rare' condition that had probably spread from his ear infection. On 22 April 2002, he failed to turn up for work and his close friends Robert Nisbet and Stephanie West went to his flat in Wells Street, off Oxford Street, in central London and found Price dead.