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Ashley’s ex-boyfriend Joe passed away just weeks before she went on ‘The Bachelor’ to court Br ad Womack!

Bachelorette Ashley Hebert has kept mum about the death of her first love Joe Olszewski. He passed away on Sept. 2, 2010 — just before Ashley started filming The Bachelor with Brad Womack. But despite her pain, Ashley never brought up the sad subject of Joe while she was on the show.

She started dating Joe after she graduated from the University of Maine in 2006, where he graduated from the year before her. And they kept in touch after they broke up, even though he lived in California and she was in dental school at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

But just before she started filming The Bachelor, Ashley found out that Joe had passed away of complications from pneumonia and acute respiratory distress syndrome.

“She was really beside herself,” Ashley’s friend Mike King tells In Touch. “She kept wondering how things could have gone differently.”

While Ashley seemed perfectly fine in front of Brad, she was actually grieving.

“She was asking herself questions, thinking that if she’d stayed with Joe, he wouldn’t have ended up in California, and maybe wouldn’t have developed the condition,” Mike tells the mag.

Joe had 14 doctors working to save his life in a Burbank, Calif., hospital, but after spending three weeks in intensive care, his heart gave out.

Ashley had spoken with Joe before he went into the hospital, but before she knew it, he was gone.

Let’s hope Ashley’s heart has healed enough to let her find love again on The Bachelorette.

— Lindsey DiMattina

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