Hayden Panettiere took one fatal pill the day she died, and multiple law enforcement sources believe it was oxycodone laced with fentanyl. The actress, who died August 16 in Greenville, South Carolina, at age 36, had a long-time drug dealer in Los Angeles who provided her with several black-market prescription drugs, including oxycodone, according to sources connected to the case.
Sources say Panettiere consumed several drugs she purchased from her dealer during a flight from Los Angeles to South Carolina the day before she died. Authorities believe she took an oxycodone pill the morning of her death and that the pill was laced with fentanyl, an opioid 50 times stronger than heroin. The DEA in both Los Angeles and South Carolina are now investigating, attempting to trace the fatal pill back to her alleged dealer. The case has drawn comparisons to Mac Miller’s death, where a drug dealer was convicted of supplying the rapper with fentanyl-laced pills.
When first responders arrived at the condo where Panettiere and her boyfriend Brian Hickerson were staying, he gave them a bag of her prescription medications and administered Narcan to the unresponsive actress before paramedics arrived, to no avail. The toxicology results remain pending, and law enforcement sources caution that everything hinges on those findings, but their working theory is that a fentanyl-laced oxy pill killed her. Panettiere had been open about her addiction battles in her memoir This Is Me: A Reckoning, published just three months before her death, where she revealed she was first offered “happy pills” at age 15.
