Hayden Panettiere died from fentanyl overdose, coroner says

“Heroes” and “Nashville” star Hayden Panettiere’s death has been ruled an accident caused by the toxic effects of multiple drugs, including fentanyl, officials said Monday.The Greenville County Coroner’s Office said Tuesday that her “cause of death has been ruled as toxic effects of fentanyl, 4-ANPP, Alprazolam, Methocarbamol, and Quetiapine.”There were no signs of trauma that would have contributed to Panettiere’s death, the release added.Panettiere, 36, died on Aug.

16 at a South Carolina apartment complex where she had been staying.Authorities found her unresponsive after responding to a report of a cardiac arrest.The Greenville Police Department said there were no signs of foul play during the initial response and investigation.

The Drug Enforcement Administration was also investigating Panettiere’s death.Panettiere’s on-again, off-again boyfriend, Brian Hickerson, was at the apartment complex at the time of her death and showed authorities what a police report described as a “bag of medication” he said she was taking.In an interview with NBC News last month, a former DEA special agent who probed the overdose deaths of Michael Jackson, Matthew Perry and other celebrities said investigators were likely attempting to reconstruct Panettiere’s final days.“They will use forensics to exploit her telephone, try to recreate 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, a 32-year veteran of the DEA’s field office in Los Angeles.“Once there’s a timeline of what she was doing before her death, it becomes easier to kind of find where that drug distribution took place that killed her,” Bodner added.Panettiere’s relationship with Hickerson — an aspiring actor from South Carolina — appeared to have ended in 2020 amid allegations of domestic violence, but her mother told NBC News that they were still seeing each o...