The Drug Enforcement Administration has joined the investigation into Hayden Panettiere's death, according to ABC News. The DEA is participating in a joint effort with the Greenville Police Department in South Carolina and the local medical examiner's office, according to TMZ.
Panettiere died Sunday night at age 36. The official cause of her death has not yet been determined. In her 2026 memoir titled "This Is Me: A Reckoning", Panettiere detailed her years of struggle against addiction to drugs and alcohol.
Following news of Panettiere's death, tributes from Hollywood artists arrived on social media. On Wednesday, Jack Coleman, who played her father in the series "Heroes", shared an emotional tribute on Instagram. "I am inconsolable. I couldn't begin to express my thoughts until now, and they will be insufficient", Coleman wrote. "I have loved Hayden from day one of the 'Heroes' pilot, 20 years ago, when she showed up screaming 'dad' and threw her arms around me. From that day on, she called me 'daddy'. She was Haydini, because she was a magician".
Christy Carlson Romano, a Disney Channel actress known for playing Ren Stevens in "Even Stevens" and for voicing the main character in "Kim Possible", also shared a memory of Panettiere on Wednesday. In an essay for Elle magazine, she compared the trauma of childhood fame to Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, a brain disease caused by repeated blows to the head. "The former child actor exists in a category that the world does not know how to sustain", she wrote. "We are children when the public wants to protect us, professionals when the industry wants to exploit us, and spoiled celebrities when we finally show symptoms of having been both... Early fame is like CTE. Not like a diagnosis. Like a way of thinking about repeated impact. Now we 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".
