The Drug Enforcement Administration has joined the investigation into Hayden Panettiere's death, according to ABC News. The agency is now working alongside South Carolina's Greenville Police Department and the local coroner's office in a joint effort, TMZ reported.
Panettiere died Sunday night at age 36. Authorities have not yet determined an official cause of death. In her 2026 memoir, "This Is Me: A Reckoning," Panettiere wrote in detail about her years-long struggles with drug and alcohol addiction.
As news of her death spread, tributes began arriving from across Hollywood. On Wednesday, Jack Coleman, who played her father on "Heroes," posted an emotional message on Instagram.
"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."
Christy Carlson Romano, the Disney Channel star known for playing Ren Stevens on "Even Stevens" and voicing the title character on "Kim Possible," also shared a remembrance on Wednesday in an essay for Elle. Romano drew a comparison between the trauma of childhood fame and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, the brain disease caused by repeated head injuries.
"The former child actor exists in a category the world does not know how to hold," she 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."
Photo: GabboT, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
