O who voiced Lilo in Lilo & Stitch in 2002 and starred as Samara Morgan in the 2002 film The Ring, died after allegedly contracting meningitis while living on the streets of L.A. amid a serious drug addiction.
TMZ, who first reported her death, noted that she’d also been hospitalized earlier in the month for malnutrition. She was just 35.
“It’s such a tragedy,” her friend Shawn Rosenthal tells PEOPLE.
But the question remains: How did a once-promising child star, who landed coveted roles and even won awards, meet such an end?
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Roy Hernandez, a man claiming to be Chase’s boyfriend, told that Chase’s life became more difficult as she dealt with bullying, had a falling out with her family and “struggled to find safety and happiness.” (Hernandez also set up a GoFundMe to pay for cremation expenses, but those close to Chase, including her former manager John Ryan, have urged people not to donate,
In an , the late actress’s mother, Cathy Chase, denied that a family fallout was behind her daughter’s issues.
“It upsets me because people are saying I must’ve been a bad mother, but I never gave up on her,” she told the outlet of her late daughter. “As a mother, you don’t give up on your child. I was hoping she would still come home.”
Cathy says her daughter’s addiction struggles began after a 2016 motorcycle accident, when doctors prescribed her painkillers.
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“She was seeking drugs and was partying with the wrong people,” she told the outlet. “I never kicked my daughter out. She wanted freedom and these people got her hooked on some drugs. That was the beginning.”
Cathy, a former nurse who moved from Oregon to Los Angeles for her daughter’s acting career, added that she “tried desperately to try to get [Daveigh] help, but you can’t legally force someone who doesn’t want that help.” Cathy also said that she believed the drugs had made her daughter mentally unwell.
“She was completely gone, like, out of her mind,” Cathy said. “The drugs took hold of her.”
Born in 1990, Chase was a child actress and launched her career with a guest role on Sabrina the Teenage Witch when she was just eight years old. She later landed her 2001 breakout role portraying Samantha Darko, the younger sister of in the psychological thriller .
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In 2002, she was cast as the voice of , a quirky Hawaiian girl, in , and that same year starred as Samara Morgan, the main character in the horror film The Ring, which earned her an MTV Movie Award for Best Villain.
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Between 2003 and 2004, she had a starring role as Joyce, the girlfriend of Oliver Beene in the period sitcom of the same name, and in 2006, starred as a teenage bride in the HBO series Big Love. Her final roles were in 2016’s horror films American Romance and Jack Goes Home, before she disappeared from acting completely. In recent years, she was reportedly homeless and living on Skid Row in downtown L.A.
Rosenthal tells PEOPLE that he tried several times to get Daveigh the help she needed during that period.
“I was pretty close to Daveigh from around 2018 to 2023,” Rosenthal says.
“She was an incredible singer, and we would play music together that, unfortunately, we never had a chance to record. I wound up getting clean in 2023, which is why I haven’t seen her since then. Some of her sober friends and I were trying to find her and get her help, but to no avail. She was surrounding herself with the worst of the worst people. It’s such a tragedy because no one cared for her best interests at all.”
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Rosenthal confirms that in recent years, Chase no longer resembled the girl who appeared on TV and in film.
“She was very unrecognizable compared to her photos from when she was making films and doing voiceovers on TV shows,” he says. “I feared hearing this news. I pray she’s just finally at peace.”
In her Daily Mail interview, Cathy Chase says the news of Daveigh’s death left her devastated.
“I actually thought it was fake news, that first time I saw it, and then, but then all of a sudden, it’s all of these different legitimate sites had her name and I realized that it wasn’t fake,” Cathy told the outlet, adding that she last saw Daveigh in 2019.
Cathy also said that she would routinely scroll through various social media platforms and the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s website at night, looking for traces of her daughter — including on Tuesday, June 16, just before news of the actress’s death broke.
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In that moment, she said, “I was devastated.”
“It felt like something inside of me squeezing all of the air out of me, and at the same time, it felt like I was exploding outwardly,” Cathy told the Daily Mail. “I let out this guttural scream and I just was running. And these weird sounds were coming out of me, these kind of, like, primeval sounds,” she told the outlet. “And I went out into the backyard, and I was screaming, ‘No, no, no, no!’ I am in so much pain, but I hope her soul heard me.”