“Unfortunately, in a tragic turn of events, my sister lost her life on the same day. I feel blessed that I was able to spend the last week with my mother before she passed. I appreciate everyone’s love and support and respect for my privacy during this impossible time,” she said.

The news sparked renewed interest in Carey, one of the most successful pop stars of the past few decades, with more than a dozen No. 1 hits and an estimated net worth in the hundreds of millions.

Her success stands in stark contrast to her troubled childhood on Long Island, New York, which Patricia Carey described in an old conversation with Oprah Winfrey.

In an excerpt from the 1999 interview, Patricia Carey says she moved to a new, “affluent” part of Long Island, hoping it would eliminate the racist abuse.

But Patricia said things got worse and that in 1970, someone was shot in their home, when Mariah Carey was just a baby.

“I thought, ‘Well, it’s a more affluent area. Maybe we’ll be accepted by this group of people.’ And that was the worst part, of course,” she said.

“One of our dogs was poisoned. We had a bay window in the front of the house and one night we were eating dinner, or I was clearing the table, and someone shot through the window. Luckily there were no children in the room. In this affluent neighborhood,” she said.

Mariah shared that she struggled with people not accepting her ethnicity.

“I feel like I’ve come a long way in terms of people not accepting me. But there are still people, in Europe or wherever I am, who say, ‘You’re working with all these black artists and you’re doing this and that.’

I’ve been saying this for nine years now, and I explain it. But no matter how many times you explain it, people don’t understand.”

Patricia divorced Mariah’s father, Alfred Roy Carey, in 1972 when Mariah was three years old.

Mariah explained her “complicated” relationship with her mother in her 2020 memoir, “The Meaning of Mariah Carey.”

“Our relationship is a thorny cord of pride, pain, shame, gratitude, jealousy, admiration and disappointment. A complicated love binds my heart to my mother’s,” she wrote.

“To maintain my sanity and peace of mind, my therapist encouraged me to literally rebrand and reframe my family,” she added.

“My mother became Pat to me, Morgan my ex-brother and Alison my ex-sister… I had to stop expecting that one day they would miraculously become the mother, big brother and big sister that I had always fantasized about.”

In 2001, Patricia was the one who called 911 to get medical help for Mariah. According to Yahoo, she was subsequently placed under psychiatric treatment for a limited time.