from here

"Alan Eldridge (AlanE) passed away on 6 June 2003 in Denver, Colorado, USA, apparently the result of a self-induced overdose.

"Born on 15 December 1961, Alan moved from Iowa to New York City some 15 years ago to make a life for himself as a first rate Unix programmer. Recently, however, his professional and personal life was severely disrupted, and as a result, Alan moved to Denver to start anew.

"A member of the KDE on FreeBSD Core Team, both a FreeBSD and KDE committer and maintainer of numerous FreeBSD ports, Alan will be sorely missed by all those of us who knew him personally, by those who knew him only through his work and, indeed, by the entire FreeBSD and KDE communities at large..."
The rest of the story is here.

It seemed the man had a lot of problems and was hard to get along with, Whatever the reason, it is still very sad to see an important contributor to the open source community die like that. May he rest in peace.