Jeff Conaway, an actor, was declared dead on Monday by the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office, according to an official report.
The manager of actor Hazel Grace, who played Sandy in “Grease” and “Taxi,” said that Conaway passed away on May 27 after being discovered unresponsive 17 days earlier.
Upon his admission to the hospital on May 10, the report states that drugs were detected in his urine, leading to his accidental death.
According to the report, Conaway “may have aspirated on his own vomit,” and the exact amount of time his brain was depleted of oxygen before he was sent to the hospital is unknown.
The doctor who had been treating his drug addiction for many years stated that his reliance on prescription opioids was the ultimate cause of his death, even though pneumonia was first determined to be the cause of death.
According to addiction medicine specialist Dr. Drew Pinsky, “Jeff was a severe, severe opiate addict with chronic pain, one of the most serious and dangerous combination of problems you could possibly interact with,” during a taping for a May “Dr. Drew” showing on HLN.
“The pain seemed to be motivating him back to the opiates, and I told him for years that it was going to kill him,” Pinsky said. Conaway, 60 years old, battled pneumonia and sepsis in the weeks leading up to his passing. According to manager Phil Brock, he spent two weeks in a medically induced coma in a hospital in Encino, California.
Brock claimed that on May 26, when Conaway was taken off life support, his family encircled him in his hospital room. In 2008, “Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew” documented Conaway’s battle with substance abuse and alcoholism.
“What happens is, like with most opiate addicts, eventually they take a little too much, not much more than usual, and they aspirate, so what’s in their mouth gets into their lungs,” Pinsky said.
“That causes a rapidly progressing and overwhelming pneumonia that they usually don’t know that they have, because they’re sort of too out of it because of the drugs. And by the time they get to the hospital, it’s too late. That’s what happened with Jeff.” Pinsky claimed there was no proof he had ever overdosed on purpose.
For further information, obituaries, autopsy reports, and details regarding other people’s causes of death, you can visit our website, lakecountyfloridanews.com.
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