Days before Hayden Panettiere was found dead in an apartment complex in South Carolina, her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Brian Hickerson, had his request to have his felony domestic violence charges reduced to misdemeanors denied by a judge.
As reported by Page Six, Hickerson requested to have his felony charges in connection with abusive incidents involving Panettiere reduced to misdemeanors. In April 2021, he pleaded no contest to two counts of injuring a spouse or girlfriend in Los Angeles in a series of incidents between May 2019 and January 2020. His motion to have the charges reduced or expunged was rejected in a hearing on Aug. 13, just days before Panettiere was found dead aged 36 on Aug. 16.
He made a similar request to have the felonies dismissed and reduced last year, but the motions were also denied. Following his guilty plea in 2021, Hickerson was sentenced to 45 days in county jail, four years of probation, 52 domestic violence classes, and was given a five-year restraining order. He first got into a relationship in 2018, but their relationship repeatedly made headlines for incidents of domestic abuse.
In 2020, for example, he was accused of punching Panettiere in the face in Jackson, Wyoming. She detailed some of the incidents of violence in her memoir, This Is Me: A Reckoning, which hit store shelves earlier this year.
TMZ reported that Panettiere died of an apparent overdose at an apartment she was staying in Greenville, South Carolina. Narcan, a drug used to help treat overdoses, was reportedly found at the scene. It’s unclear if she treated herself with Narcan, or if the unidentified person who found her administered it. Responding services attempted to resuscitate Panettiere with CPR and other life-saving techniques, but they were unsuccessful, and she was later pronounced dead.
