For the record, he mostly said, "my daughter needed me" which is totally different from "needing to see your daughter".

Anyway, he doesn't owe the public any explanation. Sometimes something happens in your life and you can't fulfill your contractual obligations, shit happens!

If Stephanie had ODed while Jon was on tour, don't you think that he would have canceled a show or two to be by her side? Would you have called him a moron for not showing up on show day although there were "at least 500.000 people (who had) bought a ticket and expect(ed) you to be there."? I think that Jon would have completely forgotten his work ethics in such circumstances and I base my speculations on the fact that he was in Europe when Sandy hit the Jersey shore and wanted to go back to NYC immediately although he was scheduled to appear in several shows: off with his "the show must go on no matter what" policy. He couldn't fly back home only because he couldn't find a flight (NJ/NY airports were under water) so he went on doing business as usual or else he would have let down everybody (fans) just the same.

+1. We don't know anything about it so calling him names is just plain stupid and childish. As Hugh put it in his latest interview, it's not what Richie did but how he did it.
I remember an interview where Richie explained that he was about to leave to go back on tour when his daughter told him she needed him and wanted him to drive her to school. She was 15 back then and just a few months earlier her mother had been rushed to hospital because she had been found unresponsive after what was rumored to be a suicide attempt. I'm a father myself and my first teaching assignment was in a highschool where the majority of the pupils came from dysfunctional families, i.e. I'm used to interacting with teenagers so I can imagine and understand what was going on in her mind at that time.
Or maybe Ava was perfectly alright and Richie just used her as an excuse to justify his behavior, who knows? Then yes, he would be a moron!

I said it before and I'll say it again: I believe that he was burnt out (although he said he wasn't in several interviews, but denial is part of the problem) and when you break down, you lose control and behave in unusual ways. And that is a valid excuse because burnout is an illness.

If, as you said, he had been a liability for years then it was his employer's responsibility to do something about it and not hire him any longer. When Jon explained that he knew beforehand what Paul was about to tell him (i.e. that Richie hadn't come to Calgary) he implied that he knew that Richie wouldn't show up one day or another so why not do something about it to prevent it from happening? A good CEO needs to anticipate things, when he hides the dust under the rug, he's sure to have to cope with even bigger problems in the long run.

But all of this is just speculation of course. I don't know more than what they said and I'm not looking for excuses, I'm just saying that he did what he did because he most likely thought he couldn't do otherwise at that very moment. Whether it was an impulsive or a fully thought out action I don't know, I don't judge him and I expected a better understanding from people who call themselves"fans".