Hayden Panettiere's death was ruled an accident five weeks after she was found, and the investigation is still open
Five weeks passed between the morning she was found and the sentence that names what happened. The office in South Carolina has now published its conclusion, and it closes one question while leaving the one the federal agents are working on wide open.
The Greenville County Coroner's Office in South Carolina released its findings on Tuesday, five weeks after Hayden Panettiere was found unresponsive. Her death has been ruled an accident caused by the toxic effects of multiple drugs, and the office said there were no signs of trauma that contributed to it. She was 36.
Panettiere died on 16 August at an apartment complex in Greenville where she had been staying. Emergency services were called to a report of a cardiac arrest and found her unresponsive. The Greenville Police Department said at the time that its initial response and investigation turned up no signs of foul play, and the Drug Enforcement Administration opened an inquiry of its own.
What the coroner's office actually said
Her "cause of death has been ruled as toxic effects of fentanyl, 4-ANPP, Alprazolam, Methocarbamol, and Quetiapine," the Greenville County Coroner's Office said in its release.
A ruling of accident is a legal classification about intent, not a conclusion about how the substances were obtained. That second question is what the DEA inquiry concerns, and it has not been closed. A former DEA special agent who worked the overdose cases of Michael Jackson and Matthew Perry described to NBC News the standard method for that kind of work.
"They will use forensics to exploit her telephone, try to re-create the last two or three days of her life from looking at text messages, looking at phone calls, looking at interaction with people on social media," said Bill Bodner, who spent 32 years in the agency's Los Angeles field office.
The book she published first
Panettiere had already written about the years behind this. Her memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, came out earlier this year and dealt directly with her addiction and with the postpartum depression that followed the birth of her daughter in 2014. She described drinking heavily, entering rehab, and giving custody of her child to the girl's father, the Ukrainian heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko, in 2018.
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The ruling lists five substances, and one of them is the reason federal agents are involved at all:
- Fentanyl — the synthetic opioid named first in the finding.
- 4-ANPP — not psychoactive in itself. It is the direct chemical precursor used to make fentanyl, a Schedule II substance in its own right, and it turns up as a contaminant in fentanyl that was never properly purified. Nobody is prescribed it.
- Alprazolam — the benzodiazepine sold as Xanax.
- Methocarbamol — a muscle relaxant.
- Quetiapine — an antipsychotic, also prescribed for bipolar disorder and, off label, for sleep.
What the record holds so far is thin. Panettiere's on-and-off partner, Brian Hickerson, was at the complex that morning and showed officers what the police report describes as a bag of medication he said she was taking. His lawyer said in August that police found no signs of foul play and that there would be no further comment while the investigation continued.
What is still not settled
The coroner has answered what killed her. Nobody has answered where the fentanyl came from, and that is the part the federal inquiry exists to establish. Her mother, Lesley Vogel, and a lawyer for her on-and-off partner have both declined further comment while the investigation continues.
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