A very sad story reached an even sadder ending yesterday morning, when Deftones bassist Chi Cheng died, nearly five years after a car crash left him in a coma. He was 42.

Cheng joined the nascent Deftones in 1988 and played on five of their albums. The band came to prominence along with a wave of nu-metal bands in the mid-’90s, when their deep, sonorous grooves and their intense, slow-building angst-explosions pushed the band past almost all of their peers. But as the Deftones continued, they developed into something else — an adventurous, melodic, powerful inward-looking prog-metal band. Cheng’s heady, immersive basslines were among the band’s greatest assets.

Cheng was leaving a memorial service for his older brother in November 2008, when his car hit another and flipped three times. He’d been in a coma ever since, showing signs of improvement but never coming all the way out. On the One Love For Chi Foundation website yesterday, his mother wrote, “He was taken to the emegency room and at 3 am today his heart just suddenly stopped. He left this world with me singing songs he liked in his ear.”