They are living in a house of pain until they get answers.
The family of an ’80s rocker’s fiancé who plunged from a cruise ship Sunday are feeling “lost” and completely in the dark about her mysterious death following a shouting match with her famous lover — receiving little information from authorities and getting the brush-off from “rude” Royal Caribbean agents.
The mother and brothers of Kimberly Burch, 51, received no calls from authorities or the cruiseline about her death — and only learned of the tragedy from her longtime boyfriend, Faster Pussycat singer Taime Downe, who had been hired to perform on the seven-day ’80s-themed voyage aboard the Explorer of the Seas.
“We would have never even known it happened if Taime hadn’t called,” Kimberly’s brother Kip Burch told The Post.
Even after her family, who lives in Alabama, reached out to Royal Caribbean, the company refused to discuss the situation.
“We kept calling, but they wouldn’t tell us anything. The first woman I spoke with said we would have to talk to her emergency contact, but she wouldn’t tell us who the emergency contact was. She was kind of rude,” Kip Burch lamented.
The family still has no clue whether Kimberly — who left her small town in the Alabama backwoods to pursue a modeling career in Los Angeles — fell from her cabin balcony by accident, chose to jump or was pushed, as some internet sleuths speculate.
“We feel lost … We have no answers at all,” her other brother, Keith Burch, said. “Something happening to one of your loved ones, and not even knowing what happened — it’s awful.”
Burch, a police officer in the town of Moundville, about 70 southwest of Birmingham, said he has exhausted his law enforcement connections trying to find out something — anything — about what happened to his sister.
Though he eventually got through to sheriffs in the Explorer of the Seas’ home port of Miami, they told him a full investigation would not begin until the vessel returned to port on Sunday.
“I’ve looked at the things swirling around social media, but I don’t pay attention to it because no real investigation has even started,” Kip Burch said.
Rumors of foul play exploded after the revelation that Downe and Burch had gotten into a shouting match shortly before the incident and that she had been drinking on the cruise, which was unusual for her, her mother Carnell Burch told TMZ.
Kimberly Burch seemed happy in Los Angeles, never talked about mental health issues and had been looking forward to the Caribbean vacation with her celebrity beau, whom she had been dating for about six years, Kip revealed.
Neither brother had met Downe, whose band’s biggest hit was the 1989 power ballad “House of Pain,” in person and knew little about their sister’s relationship, though nothing about the rocker raised red flags, he added.
Courtesy of Keith Burch
Just after Kimberly Burch’s tragic fall, as rescuers from the US Coast Guard and the Royal Bahamas Defense Force searched the seas for her, law enforcement sealed off the couple’s cabin and wouldn’t even let Downe back inside for a change of clothes — forcing the “Poison Ivy” singer to wander the deck in his pajamas, Kip Burch’s mother told her sons after speaking with Downe.
For now, all the brothers can do is wait for answers and support their mother, who is in her late 70s, confined to a wheelchair and has been “absolutely destroyed” by her daughter’s death.
“Our mom raised us. She worked all the time. I guess we were poor, but we didn’t know we were poor because our mom never let us go without anything,” Kip Burch recalled.
“When Kim said she wanted to leave and become a model, everyone else thought she was nuts, but mom believed in her. She knew she had bigger dreams than Alabama.”
