Lawsuit Over Kiss Guitar Tech’s Covid Death Officially Over

The wrongful death lawsuit filed by the family of the Kiss guitar tech who died from Covid-19 while quarantining on the band’s End of the Road World Tour in 2021 ended Wednesday with an official dismissal by the court. The family previously filed a notice of “conditional settlement” involving the band and concert promoter Live Nation, but the court set a hearing for Friday, Nov. 7 to check on the status of the pact. That hearing was cancelled on Wednesday.

No terms of the private settlement were released. Stueber’s widow, Catherine, and lawyers on both sides did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday. Francis Stueber, 53, worked as the guitar tech for Kiss co-founder Paul Stanley for 20 years before his death on Oct. 17, 2021, Stanley previously confirmed in a social media post.

Catherine and several family members filed the underlying lawsuit against Stanley, his Kiss co-founder Gene Simmons, and Kiss’ longtime manager Doc McGee in October 2023, alleging negligence and wrongful death. Live Nation was also named as a defendant.

Stueber died two days after he was “abandoned” alone in a “random hotel room” as his conditions worsened, the lawsuit alleged. It said the band had “absolutely no recommendation, information, policies, procedures, or safety measures of any kind” in place to deal with staff who contracted Covid-19 on the road.

The lawsuit followed nearly two years after a Rolling Stone investigation detailed claims from several Kiss roadies who claimed lax Covid-19 protocols contributed to Stueber’s death. The roadies said the band didn’t regularly test the crew and that several crew workers fell ill with the virus before Stueber died. 

“I couldn’t believe how unsafe it was, and that we were still going,” one roadie told Rolling Stone at the time. “We’d been frustrated for weeks, and by the time Fran died, I just thought, ‘You have to be fucking kidding me.’”

The band refuted the allegations, saying its safety protocols “met, but most often exceeded, federal, state, and local guidelines.” It said, “ultimately this is still a global pandemic and there is simply no foolproof way to tour without some element of risk.”

In his post mourning Stueber’s death, Stanley called the guitar tech his “dear friend.” He said the death was sudden. “Both on and offstage I depended on him for so much. My family loved him as did I. He was so proud of his wife and 3 boys as they were of him. I’m numb,” he wrote.

Kiss previously settled a related wrongful termination lawsuit brought by the band’s longtime wig stylist. In that case, plaintiff David Mathews said he was with the band in Illinois in October 2021 when Stueber started showing severe Covid-19 symptoms. Mathews claimed he alerted McGhee to Stueber’s dire condition, but no “timely” action was taken.