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Hayden Panettiere’s on-and-off boyfriend Brian Hickerson and his brother, Zach Hickerson, were at the South Carolina apartment where the actor died over the weekend, according to a police report released on Tuesday.
A Greenville police officer who responded to the residence on Sunday afternoon was met by the brothers and then observed paramedics performing CPR on an unresponsive woman, the report states.
“The patient did not seem to have any obvious physical reasons to be unresponsive,” the officer notes. After attempting lifesaving measures, the emergency workers declared Panettiere dead at 2.31pm.
No cause has been determined, and her death remains under investigation. An autopsy found no signs of trauma, and police said officers saw no signs of foul play.
The one-time child star, who soared to fame in the TV shows Heroes and Nashville while enduring struggles with alcohol addiction and depression, would have turned 37 on Friday.
Panettiere and Hickerson had been in a tumultuous relationship for years, with allegations the 37-year-old aspiring actor physically abused her.
He was charged in 2020 with multiple counts of felony abuse, and pleaded no contest to two counts of injuring a spouse or partner and served a short time in jail due to the case. He was sentenced to four years of probation and anger management and Alcoholics Anonymous sessions.
He completed the terms and recently asked a judge to reduce his conviction to misdemeanors; that request was denied on Thursday by a Los Angeles judge. Messages were sent on Tuesday seeking comment from Pat Carey, an attorney for Hickerson.
Panettiere wrote of Hickerson’s time behind bars, and how she hoped it would change him, in her memoir This Is Me, which came out in May.
“I wanted Brian to be in jail just long enough to scare him, but not long enough where he’d become a worse person,” she wrote. “I needed him to admit his wrongs and change because of them, but I didn’t want to traumatize him in an irreversible way.”
She wrote about her decision to “let go of my resentment” and try to forgive Hickerson, whom she’d met at a West Hollywood restaurant in 2018 after noticing his “charming smile”.
The police report, which is heavily redacted, said the responding officer first spoke with Zach Hickerson, who said the unresponsive woman was his brother’s girlfriend.
“I observed Zach to be very emotional while EMS were working on Hayden. Brian did not become emotional until EMS declared her officially deceased,” the officer said.
After she was declared dead, the officer escorted the brothers out of the apartment. The officer spoke with Brian “more in depth”, but the details of that conversation are redacted in the police report.
Also redacted is a list of medications Panettiere had been taking.
In her book, Panettiere described lifelong scars from her early fame, and acknowledged being addicted to alcohol and enduring postpartum depression after the birth of her daughter, Kaya, with Ukrainian boxer Wladimir Klitschko in 2014.
Panettiere’s daughter, now 11, began living with Klitschko full-time in Ukraine when she was two. At the time, the actor was struggling with mental health and addiction. She entered rehab in 2015, while filming Nashville.
“I think there’s been this very common misconception that I just gave up my child,” she said in an interview with podcaster Jay Shetty in May. “That could not be farther from the truth.”
