Inside Daveigh Chase's Tragic Death 'She Was Always Loved'

Friends and family members remember the beloved The Ring actress and reflect on her heartbreaking downward spiral from child star to Skid Row

- by JAIME HARKIN

On June 17, Cathy Chase learned that her daughter Daveigh Chase had died the previous day at age 35 from bacterial meningitis and a blood infection. “I let out this guttural scream,” Cathy told The Daily Mail in an interview, “and I went out into the backyard, and I was screaming, ‘No, no, no, no!’”

The grieving mom was devastated but not entirely shocked. Chase — who famously voiced Lilo in the 2002 Disney film Lilo & Stitch and played Samara in The Ring before joining the cast of the HBO series Big Love — largely disappeared from the public eye around 2013, and her former manager John Ryan Jr. says she was in and out of rehab before she went missing on the streets of L.A. The actress was arrested in 2017 for riding in a stolen vehicle and in 2018 for drug possession. In recently published footage obtained by the New York Post, she can be seen looking emaciated on the floor of a tent or trailer, and according to TMZ, she was hospitalized for malnutrition weeks before her death.

"That was a very, very difficult voice to cast... And one day this girl came in, and her name was Daveigh Chase," Lilo & Stitch director Chris Sanders recalled of the actress.

Those who were close to Chase before her life unraveled describe her as kind and magnetic, and say they never gave up on her, even as she drifted further away from friends and family. One source who hung out with her between 2010 and 2015 tells Us she was “effortlessly cool; the girl everyone wanted to know.” The source also says friends became “aware she was struggling with drugs,” and that they tried in vain to help her over the years. “No one stopped looking for her,” says the source. “No one ever stopped caring about her. She was always loved.”

EARLY DAYS