A 24-year-old singer died in the hotel room of music ex David Bolno. Their relationship ran deeper than he has admitted.

• Camila Sterling, an aspiring singer, overdosed in music exec David Bolno's hotel room.
• She was a Colombian immigrant chasing her dreams. Bolno bankrolled her and connected her with top artists.
• Friends feel there's no closure around Sterling's death. Bolno was cleared by police.

Just after midnight on March 30, the up-and-coming musician Camila Sterling arrived at a luxury Miami Beach hotel to meet David Bolno, a money man for some of the biggest names in music, including Drake, Justin Bieber, and Will.i.am.

Thirteen hours later, she was dead.

When asked about her death two weeks later by the Daily Mail, Bolno called her a "client" who "was going to sign a record deal with me."

But Business Insider found that their relationship ran deeper than Bolno has acknowledged. Sterling referred to Bolno as her "boyfriend" in texts and voice memos and said he paid her more than $140,000 to rent a condo at the luxe Paramount Miami Worldcenter. Bolno also seems to have created a record label with the primary purpose of releasing Sterling's music.

Read Business Insider's full report on Camila Sterling's life and death here.

Sterling first made a splash in 2022, working with some of reggaeton's biggest names on her two singles, "Hookah" and "Moet." But few people seemed to know about her connections to Bolno. Even longtime friends only had an inkling that she was dating someone powerful.

In interviews, Sterling alluded to someone who helped her make connections in the music industry. "I can't say their name," she said in a 2022 interview with the Puerto Rican podcast "Desde El Bunker," but this person "gave me the opportunity to be in music and was the first person who believed in me no matter what."

It's not clear how Sterling and Bolno met. Bolno created DTB Records, the entity that holds the copyrights to Sterling's music, in November 2021, and in an April 4 interview at his lawyer's office he told police he'd known Sterling for two years.

Sterling arrived at the luxurious Setai hotel shortly after midnight on March 30 and spent about four hours with Bolno before he left for the airport around 4:30 a.m. He told police that Sterling used tusi, a mix of ketamine and MDMA, in his presence, although he said she appeared sober before he left.

At 8:18 a.m., a woman with "slow speech" called the hotel's front desk for room service, police records say. But when the food came, no one answered the door. After checkout time had passed, hotel staff conducted a welfare check and found Sterling unresponsive in the fetal position in the bathtub. She was declared dead at 1:22 p.m.

Bolno didn't respond to requests for comment, and his lawyer declined to comment. Some people who were close to Sterling expressed frustration with the lack of closure and the silence surrounding her death. "There's people who will probably crank me for life for talking about this," one person who worked with Sterling said when BI knocked on her door requesting an interview.

Read Business Insider's full report on Camila Sterling's life and death here.