Actress Hayden Panettiere was found dead in a rented living room armchair in Greenville, South Carolina, on Sunday afternoon at the age of 36.
Zach Hickerson, the brother of her on-off boyfriend Brian Hickerson, discovered the star unresponsive at around 1.30pm, according to an anonymous source reported by TMZ.
Brian Hickerson was sleeping in a bedroom of the rented loft at the Judson Mill Lofts apartment complex, where the pair had been staying temporarily. Both brothers called 911 when they failed to wake Panettiere.
Police Response and Emergency CPR
Emergency medical service teams performed CPR on Panettiere for nearly an hour before she was formally declared dead at the scene in front of the brothers, according to a police report.
An officer at the scene noted that Zach Hickerson was "very emotional" while watching paramedics attempt CPR. Police reported that Brian Hickerson did not appear to show emotion until Panettiere was pronounced dead.
Officers arrived at the property at 1.50pm. A heavily redacted police report recorded that multiple firemen and EMS personnel performed CPR for "an extended amount of time" on the actress, "who did not seem to have any obvious physical reasons to be unresponsive."
Medication and Cause of Death Investigation
After officers arrived on the scene, Brian Hickerson allegedly showed police a "bag of medication" that Panettiere had been taking at the time of her death.
Audio from the 911 call revealed that a dispatcher described the medical emergency as a "cardiac arrest" and noted a suspected overdose. Sources told TMZ that Narcan, a nasal spray medication used to treat opioid overdoses, was also found on a mattress inside the property.
The Greenville County Coroner's Office confirmed that Panettiere's cause of death remains under official investigation.
In a statement, the Greenville Police Department said that "the preliminary investigation has not indicated any signs of foul play or suspicious circumstances." An autopsy found "no signs of trauma were discovered that would have contributed to the death."
Relationship History and Domestic Violence Charges
Panettiere and Brian Hickerson, a real estate agent from South Carolina, had flown together from Los Angeles to his home state one day before she died.
The couple first began dating in 2018, but their relationship became tumultuous as Hickerson was arrested multiple times on domestic violence charges.
Court records show Hickerson was arrested in May 2019 and charged with injuring a spouse or girlfriend. He pleaded no contest to the allegations in April 2021 and was sentenced to 45 days in county jail alongside four years of probation.
Panettiere filed for a restraining order against Hickerson in July 2020 after their relationship appeared to end. Court records do not state the outcome of that request. Just three days before Panettiere's death, a judge denied a request by Hickerson to reduce his past felony charges.
Memoir Abuse Allegations
Panettiere disclosed intimate details of her relationship with Hickerson in her memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, which was published three months before her death.
In the book, she alleged that Hickerson once beat her so severely that she was forced to remain inside her house for weeks to prevent the public from seeing her injuries.
She wrote that she tried to keep the alleged abuse from police out of fear of public exposure, describing her time with Hickerson as a "very dark and complicated time in my life."
Family Life and Acting Career
Panettiere had spoken in recent months about her troubled childhood growing up in the public eye. She was mother to an 11-year-old daughter, Kaya, born following a life-threatening birth. Full custody of the child was later granted to her former fiancé, Wladimir Klitschko, a former heavyweight boxing champion who serves as a Ukrainian government official.
Panettiere began her career as a child actor in television soap operas before gaining wider recognition in the 2000 sports drama Remember the Titans alongside Denzel Washington. She also voiced the character Dot in Pixar's 1998 animated feature A Bug's Life.
She achieved global fame playing cheerleader Claire Bennet in the NBC superhero drama series Heroes from 2006 to 2010. She later starred as country singer Juliette Barnes for six seasons on Nashville, earning two Golden Globe nominations for Best Supporting Actress and securing 11 entries on the US Billboard Hot Country Songs chart.
Her feature film credits included the 2006 comedy Bring It On: All or Nothing, Raising Helen, and playing fan-favorite character Kirby Reed in both Scream 4 and Scream VI.
