New Year’s Eve is celebrated worldwide by hundreds of millions of people with aspirations of shedding old habits and embracing the new year. No one wants to believe that they will be mourning the death of their loved ones less than 24 hours later, but Nick Gordon’s family had to face tragic news on January 1. The former fiancée of Bobbi Kristina Brown died from a suspected drug overdose, and after the news surfaced, less than favorable reports about him resurfaced.

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“That’s my older brother. When people see me, they see Nick,” Gordon’s brother Jack Walker Jr. told Entertainment Tonight. “Everything that he’s taught me, I’m going to live through. I’m going to make sure I take it and I use it. And I’m going to make sure everything that he wanted me to do, I’m going to do it.”

Although it’s suspected that Gordon’s cause of death was from a drug overdose, Jack insists that when he spoke to Gordon, he seemed just fine. “I spoke to him six hours before he passed,” he said. “He was in a normal state of mind. Nick was fine, he was cool like anybody else would be on New Year’s, honestly.” Jack added, “He called me on the phone and I was working. I was busy, so I told him I would call when I got off. It wasn’t really like he was messed up or anything like that. He was normal.”

When he heard that his brother was in the hospital, Jack rushed to his side. “I tried my hardest to wake my brother up. Me, my father and [Nick’s girlfriend] Laura [Leal] were there with him,” he said. “We were trying as hard as we possibly could to wake Nick up but, you know, it’s just how it is. God’s plan. Nick wasn’t speaking at all. He wasn’t speaking, but he could hear me.”

Whitney Houston unofficially adopted Gordon when he was 12-years-old and took him under her wing. Then, he began dating Whitney and Bobby Brown’s daughter, Bobbi Kristina, and reports ran rampant that the family was less than supportive of their union. Gordon stayed by Bobbi Kristina’s side following her mother’s death in 2012, and it was Gordon who reportedly found Bobbi Kristina face down in a bathtub in 2015. A wrongful death lawsuit was filed against the 30-year-old after Bobbi Kristina passed away six months later, and he was found guilty. Gordon was ordered to pay $36 million.

“My brother loved her,” Jack said of Gordon’s affections for Bobbi Kristina. “Everything. All this. Everything that he’s been going through has taken a toll on my brother. Everything. Everything that the media’s been throwing at him, everything that life’s been throwing at him, yeah, it took a toll on him. He lost somebody he really loved. It’s hard to be the same person when you lose somebody.”

Jack insisted that his brother was in a good place and the media has been angling Gordon to be someone that he wasn’t. “Nick was a great person, and he was loved by many people,” Jack stated. “Everybody’s entitled to their own opinion, but Nick was a great person. Nick loved everybody and people fail to realize that. All they do is read tabloids and make a judgment out of somebody off of that and that’s not the case of my brother. I’ve known the man for all of 27 years, so I think I have a better judgment on the type of person he is than the majority of the people who are writing and saying [negative] stuff about him.”