Hayden Panettiere‘s on-off boyfriend — and at one point her abuser — was visited by police after it was learned that he was present, along with his brother, at the South Carolina townhouse where medical personnel attempted but ultimately failed to revive the actor over the weekend, and she died, according to a redacted police report.
Local investigators visited Brian and Zach Hickerson’s grandmother’s home in Greenville, South Carolina, for a welfare check in the days after the actor’s death. On Monday, the Greenville County Coroner’s Office said the cause and manner of her death remain pending further investigation, and that there were no obvious signs of trauma to her body.
Page Six reported that on Wednesday at 8:20 a.m., officers knocked on several doors at the Greenville home belonging to Betty Ellison. No one answered, and the officers left without speaking to the two men; Zach Hickerson was home at the time, the outlet reported, and had kept the blinds closed all morning. Officers returned to the home later Wednesday morning, conducted a welfare check, then left after about 10 minutes, the outlet reported.
In the heavily redacted incident report from the Greenville Police Department, it’s revealed that the two brothers were present at the townhouse rental where Panettiere died. An officer reported that Zach Hickerson identified the actor to authorities as “his brother’s girlfriend”; later, when the actor became unresponsive to “advanced cardiac life support measures” administered by EMTs, Brian Hickerson became very emotional, according to the report.
At one point on Sunday, Brian Hickerson showed officers a “bag of medication” that he told police she had been taking before her death, the report states.
Panettiere’s mother, Lesley Vogel, told NBC News that her daughter had “lost her way” with Hickerson.
“This person in her life that we have been trying to get rid of for quite some time was with her at her death, and that was Brian Hickerson,” Vogel told the network.
The Heroes and Nashville actor’s relationship with Brian Hickerson was central to the discussions of domestic abuse in Panettiere’s book, This Is Me: A Reckoning, published earlier this year. He was sentenced to 45 days in jail after pleading no contest to two felony counts of injuring the actor.
The couple met in 2018 while out in West Hollywood, and after a relationship that launched at “lightning speed,” he was soon beating her so badly she would not leave the house for weeks, as she revealed in her book. Arrests on domestic abuse charges followed in Las Vegas and Los Angeles, where a physical altercation between the two led a neighbor to call police after he pinned Panettiere down and repeatedly punched her. He was initially charged with seven felony counts, including assault, misdemeanor battery, injuring a girlfriend, and dissuading a witness from prosecuting a crime. He later pleaded no contest to two felony counts.
Hickerson’s legal troubles related to the abuse have not ended. He has twice attempted to have a judge reduce his felony convictions to misdemeanors; the first attempt failed last year, and the second was denied last week.
Police have not indicated that Hickerson had anything to do with Panettiere’s death. She had attempted to distance herself from him, including hiring private security to keep him away. Still, he inserted himself into her book release earlier this year, telling TMZ that all accounts of abuse related to him in her memoir are true. He told the outlet they were “buddies” now and that he’d called her the day before her death about her book.
In her book, Panettiere discusses the insidious nature of abuse in a relationship, writing: “Abusers — they weave themselves like weeds into your life,” and later offers a warning to her readers.
“Don’t believe just what you see in a picture,” she cautioned. “There is so much more going on, so much more going on. Truth is stranger than fiction.”