Hayden Panettiere’s death ruled accidental by police
Police have closed their investigation into the death of actor Hayden Panettiere, ruling it an accidental drug overdose with no suspects.
According to local media outlets, the Greenville Police Department said on Wednesday (US time) that Panettiere’s death has been ruled accidental, following results from a September coroner’s report. No charges were laid during their investigation.
“Based on the Medical Examiner’s determination and the findings of the investigation, Hayden Panettiere’s death has been ruled accidental,” police said in a statement, per the BBC.
The coroner’s report found that the 36-year-old died from an accidental overdose of several drugs, including fentanyl, and had been in rehab just weeks before.
The Drug Enforcement Administration was also reportedly investigating the circumstances of Panettiere’s death but has not yet delivered an update.
In August, Panettiere was found unresponsive in an apartment in Greenville, South Carolina, while her on-and-off boyfriend Brian Hickerson and his brother Zach Hickerson were at the home.
A combination of fentanyl and its chemical byproduct, as well as the antianxiety medication alprazolam – a muscle relaxer and a drug used to treat major depression and other serious mental health disorders – was found in Panettiere’s system, according to a statement from the Greenville County Coroner’s Office last month.
A senior deputy coroner who visited the Airbnb apartment to investigate Panettiere’s death found blue pressed pills and a straw on a table that would later test positive for fentanyl, according to the Associated Press. A white powdery substance was also found in her suitcase in a sunglasses case.
Paramedics attended Panettiere’s apartment last month after a 911 call, performing CPR and other advanced resuscitation efforts for more than 40 minutes before she was declared dead. The autopsy found no signs of trauma that could have contributed to her death, Greenville County Coroner Mike Ellis said in a statement.
Panettiere soared to fame as a teen star of the TV show Heroes and later won plaudits for her role in Nashville. In her memoir This Is Me, released in May, Panettiere described lifelong scars from her early fame, acknowledging an alcohol addiction and enduring postpartum depression after the birth of her daughter, Kaya, with Ukrainian boxer Wladimir Klitschko in 2014.
In May this year she told the Jay Shetty Podcast she had spiralled after Klitschko told her their daughter would live with him in Europe permanently.
“I was struggling with mental health and anxiety, and the postpartum, and having to act my way through it, and just feeling like I completely lost myself,” she said.
“I think a misconception is that I have been, in the past, forced into treatment when, in fact, I have been the one who sought it out – who was saying I desperately need help.”
She said she had fallen into a “horrible cycle” of depression, anxiety, alcoholism and substance abuse to “find her way out of the darkness”.
Panettiere had been treated for alcohol and opioid addiction in 2020 and had been in rehab just weeks before her death, according to the September coroner’s report.
In the weeks after her death, other former child stars talked about the pressures of fame and called for more protections.
“It’s not a coincidence that so many former, specifically pre-sexualised female, child ‘stars’ have profoundly sad lives and untimely ends,” Anna Paquin, who more than three decades ago became one of the youngest actors to win an Oscar for her breakout performance in The Piano, wrote on Instagram.
And in an essay for Elle magazine, Even Stevens actor Christy Carlson Romano compared the experience of early fame to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) – a degenerative brain disease linked to repeated head injuries, typically affecting contact post-athletics careers.
“We now have language for youth sports: protocols, helmets, parents worried about concussions. But we have almost no language for what happens when stress, scrutiny, rejection, adult pressure and the collapse of privacy become the architecture of a childhood,” she wrote.
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