The former child star Daveigh Chase was “obviously drugged out of her mind” in her last years, her grieving mother has said.
Chase, who shot to fame in the early Noughties as the voice of Lilo in Disney’s Lilo & Stitch and as the young villain of the horror movie The Ring, died this week at the age of 35, following years of drug addiction and homelessness.
In her first comments on her daughter’s death, Chase’s mother Cathy revealed that she had spent years desperately searching for her daughter, after she disappeared following stints in prison.
Chase had been jailed in Los Angeles after being charged with two counts of burglary, and her mother noticed an extreme change in her daughter when she visited her in prison.
“She was completely gone, like, out of her mind,” Cathy told The Daily Mail. “I honestly thought there was something wrong with her. My daughter was never diagnosed with mental health other than PTSD. But the drugs took hold of her.” She added that Chase had been “seeking drugs and was partying with the wrong people” in the wake of injuring her back in a motorcycle accident in 2016, which she believes led to her becoming addicted to painkillers, then other drugs.
Chase had agreed to be taken home by her mother upon release from prison, but was released a day early and fled before her mother’s arrival. “When I got there, she never waited,” Cathy recalled. “She went back to the streets and I couldn’t find her.”
Cathy and another one of her children would spend time searching homeless encampments across Los Angeles looking for Chase, to no avail. “It upsets me because people are saying I must’ve been a bad mother, but I never gave up on her,” Cathy said. “As a mother, you don’t give up on your child. I was hoping she would still come home.”
She added that she finally received proof of her daughter’s whereabouts when she was sent a video at the end of 2025 which appeared to show Chase frail and emaciated in an RV on Los Angeles’ notorious Skid Row.
“In the video, she was in a really bad shape,” Cathy said. “She was very frail. She was fragile. She was saying no, and trying to push the camera away, and they were shoving it in her face. It was gross. She was obviously drugged out of her mind. She was nothing but skin and bones and I didn’t want to think that was my daughter.”
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Cathy’s comments echo those of Chase’s former manager John Ryan, who revealed this week that he hadn’t seen his client in a decade.
“At first, I thought she was kidnapped or something, and then we started putting two and two together,” Ryan explained, adding that he had helped Chase into “a couple rehabs back in the day,” but that he and her friends weren’t overly concerned about her sobriety.
He said a missing persons report was never filed because Chase left of her own admission. He recalled seeing her occasionally make headlines, such as in 2017 when she was arrested for riding in a stolen car.
It was only after seeing the same 2025 video online as Chase’s mother had seen that he began a last, frantic search for Chase.
The actor’s death was announced this week by her boyfriend, Roy Hernandez, who told TMZ that she died Tuesday (16 June) shortly after being hospitalised for malnutrition. Doctors informed Hernandez that Chase also had meningitis and a blood infection, which caused the septic issues which rapidly killed her.
Chase, who hadn’t acted since 2016, starred as Donnie Darko’s little sister Samantha in the cult 2001 time travel film, and also appeared in TV series including Big Love, Charmed and ER.
