Entertainment News2 min(s) read
The Drug Enforcement Administration has joined the investigation into the death of actress Hayden Panettiere, according to a report from ABC News.
Federal agents are entering a joint effort alongside South Carolina’s Greenville Police Department and the local coroner’s office.
Panettiere died on Sunday night at the age of 36. According to the Greenville Police Department, officers were called to the scene at approximately 1:50PM on Sunday after an acquaintance of the actress placed a 911 call. Despite attempts by emergency personnel to provide medical aid, she was pronounced dead at the location.
While the official cause of death has not yet been determined, Panettiere detailed her years-long struggles with drug and alcohol addiction in her 2026 memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning.
Tributes from across Hollywood poured in online following the news. Jack Coleman, who played her father on the television series Heroes, posted a response on Instagram.
Jack Coleman expressed his feelings regarding his former costar in his online post.
“I’m heartbroken. I couldn’t begin to put my thoughts into words until now, and they will be inadequate,” Coleman wrote. “I’ve loved Hayden since day one of the pilot of ‘Heroes,’ 20 years ago, when she introduced herself by shouting ‘daddy’ and throwing her arms around me. From that day on, she called me daddio. She was Haydini, because she was a magician.”
Former Disney Channel star Christy Carlson Romano also shared a remembrance essay published by Elle. She compared the trauma experienced by child actors to Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE).
“The former child actor exists in a category the world does not know how to hold,” Romano wrote. “We are children when the public wants to feel protective of us, professionals when the industry wants to profit from us, and spoiled celebrities when we eventually show symptoms of having been both… Early fame is like CTE. Not as a diagnosis. As a way of thinking about repeated impact. 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.”
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