Hayden Panettiere’s Death: DEA Joins Investigation

The Drug Enforcement Administration has become involved in the investigation into the death of Hayden Panettiere, reports ABC News.

In collaboration with the Greenville Police Department in South Carolina and the local coroner’s office, the DEA is working to uncover the circumstances surrounding Panettiere’s death, according to TMZ.

Panettiere passed away on Sunday night at the age of 36. The cause of death remains undetermined. Her 2026 memoir, “This Is Me: A Reckoning,” detailed her prolonged battles with drug and alcohol addiction.

Following the announcement of Panettiere’s death, tributes from the Hollywood community surfaced online. On Wednesday, Jack Coleman, who portrayed her father on the show “Heroes,” expressed his grief 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, known for her roles on the Disney Channel as Ren Stevens in “Even Stevens” and as the voice of the teen spy in “Kim Possible,” also paid tribute to Panettiere on Wednesday. In an essay for Elle, she drew parallels between the challenges of childhood stardom and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), a brain condition linked to 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.”