Boyfriend Who Abused Hayden Panettiere Had Returned to Her Life
A few months before her death on Sunday, Hayden Panettiere was making the rounds to promote her new memoir, where she wrote about the traumas she had faced in her life, including efforts to disentangle herself from a toxic and abusive boyfriend.Ms.Panettiere described herself as finally free of him: “Abusers — they weave themselves like weeds into your life,” she said on a podcast in May.
That boyfriend, Brian Hickerson, made his own media appearance the next day to express his regret for the abuse.Very little is publicly known about the circumstances of Ms.Panettiere’s death, which a person with knowledge of the events said was caused by an apparent drug overdose that led to cardiac arrest.
What is clear is that one of the last people to see her alive was Mr.Hickerson, with whom she had reconnected.A heavily redacted report released on Tuesday by the police in Greenville, S.C., where Ms.
Panettiere died, said that it was Mr.Hickerson and his brother, Zach Hickerson, who had called 911.
When the paramedics failed to revive her, Brian Hickerson became emotional, the police said.In an apartment complex in Greenville, Mr.Hickerson, 37, spoke with the police about Ms.
Panettiere, 36, and shared with officers a bag containing her medications, though many details are redacted in the report.She had spoken openly about struggling with addiction to pharmaceutical drugs, which started when a former representative gave her, as a teenage actress, what she thought was an amphetamine.Mr.
Hickerson has not been accused of being involved in Ms.Panettiere’s death.The Greenville Police Department has said a preliminary investigation did not produce evidence of “foul play or suspicious circumstances,” and the Greenville County Coroner’s Office has said that “no signs of trauma were discovered that would have contributed to the death.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your pati...