Rapper Nelly was so "enraged" when he learned his sister had lost her battle with leukaemia, he "destroyed" an entire room of furniture and smashed his fist through a flatscreen TV.
The hip-hop star was left devastated in 2005 when his sister Jackie Donohue died from cancer after he spent months campaigning to find a suitable bone marrow donor.
Nelly reveals he was so angry and hurt by the loss, he hit out at every material thing around him before breaking down and crying.
In a candid interview on VH1's Behind The Music, which aired in the U.S. on Monday (07Mar11), he says, "I was enraged. And we had this door in the back, where my room was. I just punched it, split the whole door, (it) broke right off the hinges. TV screen, punched it, shattered.
"Everything, I just destroyed everything that was back there and I just broke down. I did cry. She was everything to me."
Nelly's grief drove him into a self-imposed exile from the music industry for three years as he sunk into a deep depression. He finally returned to the studio in 2008 to record Brass Knuckles, but the release was a critical and commercial flop - and Nelly admits it was a big failure that shouldn't have happened.
He adds, "Brass Knuckles wasn't my best work, but my mind wasn't in it, I wasn't prepared. It had been three years, so much stuff had happened... I didn't give you a top 10 hit, I didn't do that, that's my job."