Bobby Brown opens up about daughter’s death

R&B singer Bobby Brown says regretfully that he and his late wife, pop superstar Whitney Houston, had not done everything they could have to help prevent their daughter Bobbi Kristina Brown’s death.

“We should have been better,” Brown, 47, told ABC News’ Robin Roberts in an interview for Tuesday night’s edition of “20/20.” “We could have been better,” he said. Bobbi Kristina Brown was found unconscious in a bathtub at home in January 2015, and remained largely comatose until dying that July at age 22, of lobar pneumonia due to drowning, exacerbated by drugs in her system.

Bobby Brown had even harsher words for his daughter’s partner, Nick Gordon. “It’s not a mystery to me,” he told Roberts. “The same thing that happened to my daughter is what happened to Whitney,” who died Feb. 11, 2012, at age 48, similarly of drowning in a bathtub due to the effects of cocaine and heart disease.

“There’s only one person that was around both occasions, only one person who says they were there to protect them . . . and he didn’t,” Brown said, adding, “He knows what happened. I don’t know what happened that night. But he does.”

When Roberts clarifies that Brown was speaking of Gordon, the singer responded, “I won’t say his name.”

Brown, who is promoting his memoir, “Every Little Step,” last month joined his daughter’s estate in filing a $10 million wrongful-death lawsuit against Gordon in October. Gordon has denied contributing to Bobbi Kristina Brown’s death.

“The last thing I told her, I just said, ‘Let go,’ ” Brown told Roberts. “I said, ‘It’s OK, you can go with your mom. Daddy’ll be all right. I love you. You can rest now,’ ” he said. “Hardest thing I had to do in my life was tell my daughter to let go . . . I don’t wish that on my worst enemy or any enemy. That is the worst pain in the world.”