Nolan Wells, Hayden Panettiere & Presley Gerber: Cause Of Death Updates

Jason Beckerman (0:06)

Welcome to Behind the Bar, Derek, a huge day of updates in three death investigations that we've been following closely. We have Hayden Panettiere, Presley Gerber and Nolan Wells. There's the most report in the Nolan Wells case, so we'll save that for last. But let's start with Hayden, where the coroner has officially determined that she had fentanyl in her system when she died, which is really a significant development as investigators continue to try to determine exactly what happened in the hours leading up to her death. Let's talk about Hayden.

The official cause of death remains pending, but we now know what the tox report said.

Derek Kaufman (0:41)

Well, yeah, the cause of death looks to be sort of multiple toxic effects of several drugs in her system, one of which was fentanyl. There were others, there was a muscle relaxant and an antipsychotic slash depressive drug in her system. But the working theory had been that she died by fentanyl, maybe a pill that was purchased on the black market from a drug dealer.

We had heard oxycodone might have been laced with fentanyl. Sometimes these black market drugs are cut with fentanyl and that can prove to be tragic and prove to be fatal. So now we know that the TOX reports came back with multiple drugs. And to me, this significantly complicates the investigation in some material ways. If you're going after one drug dealer and she just died of fentanyl, fentanyl can kill you in and of itself and you link the drug to the drug she purchased and that was in her system, now you've got a death case.

Jason Beckerman (1:32)

So I think it's really important to distinguish. People die of fentanyl overdoses all the time. It's a scourge that is going through. A lot of young people are dying of fentanyl overdose, the whole thing. It doesn't appear that she died of a fentanyl overdose. She had multiple drugs in her system, the combined toxicity of which appears to be what killed her.

People take fentanyl therapeutically, they take it recreationally and don't die of it. It happens all the time, it's only when you get the larger doses that people die of fentanyl itself. And so, here it seems that it was just one of many drugs that she ingested. So it's possible, unlike the working theory was that she had bought a pill that was laced with fentanyl, that's what killed her. It seems now that she just took fentanyl as one of many drugs.

Derek Kaufman (2:14)

We don't know. The toxicology report, what it does is it examines your blood and sees what's in there. So they found fentanyl in there. Now, whether that was in there as a result of a laced drug or was in there as a result of her deliberately ingesting fentanyl, the toxicology report can't tell you that. What it does say is that there were a host of other drugs, one of which was Xanax, alprazolam was in there, which is the generic form of Xanax. That is a drug that can be prescribed, obviously, for anti-anxiety and things of that nature, but it's also a popular street drug to buy and is sometimes cut with fentanyl. So if that is the case, and putting oxycodone to the side, maybe it was Xanax, then you can still go after the drug dealer. He's selling Xanax pills that were laced with fentanyl. You could potentially link him, but the polypharmacy aspect of this, that there are multiple drugs in her system, are gonna complicate whether you can pin the death on one person.

Jason Beckerman (3:02)

So in Mac Miller's case, they traced the fentanyl-laced drugs to a drug dealer who sold it to him. They prosecuted that person for the death. Here, it would seem that, given that if she died from taking all these various drugs, some of which she was obtaining legally, some she may have been obtaining illegally, some may have been laced, all combined to kill her, that's the working theory at least, then it's hard to charge anybody with the crime that led to her death. You could charge somebody with, obviously, drug charges. Drugs, which is a big, big, but they didn't necessarily lead to her death because if this is right and he sold her, you know, X amount of drugs, some had fentanyl in them, that's not what killed her. What killed her was all those drugs plus all the other stuff she was taking.

Derek Kaufman (3:43)

Now, look, we're not pharmacists and we're not medical examiners or we don't know exactly, but the types of things fentanyl does is suppress your respiration and that can lead to death.