Daveigh Chase, the former child actress who terrified audiences as Samara in "The Ring" and charmed millions as the voice of Lilo in Disney's "Lilo & Stitch," died Tuesday in Los Angeles at age 35. Her father told NBC News she died of complications from bacterial meningitis and a blood infection. She had been suffering from severe malnutrition.
The death of a once-celebrated young talent is grim enough on its own terms. What followed made it worse: a bitter public dispute between Chase's family and a man described as her boyfriend over a GoFundMe campaign, accusations of exploitation, and revelations about millions of dollars in residuals the actress never touched, all while she was reportedly living homeless on the streets of the city where she once worked on studio lots.
It is the kind of story that forces uncomfortable questions about what happens to child stars after the cameras stop rolling, and about the people and systems that fail them long before the obituaries appear.
Chase was born in Las Vegas and started singing and dancing at a young age. Her first professional work was a Campbell's Soup commercial. By eight years old, she had been cast as the voice of Lilo in Disney's animated hit, a role Fox News Digital reported she would reprise for more than 60 episodes of "Lilo & Stitch: The Series" and across various video games and multimedia projects.
The same year, 2002, she played Samara Morgan in the DreamWorks horror film "The Ring," the ghostly girl who crawls out of a television set. The role made her a pop-culture icon. At the 2003 MTV Movie Awards, Chase won Best Villain, beating out Mike Myers, Colin Farrell, Willem Dafoe, and Daniel Day-Lewis.
She also voiced Chihiro in the English dub of "Spirited Away," as the Washington Times noted in cataloging her career highlights. All three of those landmark roles landed in a single year. She was barely a teenager.
In a 2009 interview with Interview Magazine, Chase expressed ambitions that sounded both earnest and haunted by the transience of Hollywood fame: "I just want to make something that I love and people will respect. I want to do things that will change someone's life, not something they'll forget about tomorrow."
The gap between Chase's early success and her final years is staggering. The New York Post reported that Chase had millions of dollars in unclaimed residuals sitting in a SAG-AFTRA account at the time of her death, earnings from a deal struck when she was eight that included merchandise, theme park attractions, and other products using her voice.
She never collected the money. Her former manager, John Ryan Jr., told the Post she was "too far gone."
Chase's father, John Schwallier, told NBC News his daughter had struggled with drugs since she was 13 years old. The AP reported that Chase had been living homeless in Los Angeles with her boyfriend near the hospital where she ultimately died. The New York Post described footage from late 2025 showing her on skid row, appearing hauntingly thin and barely conscious, allegedly addicted to heroin and fentanyl.
That a child who voiced one of Disney's most beloved characters could end up wasting away on the streets of Los Angeles, with a fortune in residuals untouched in a union account, says something about the distance between the industry's glittering surface and the wreckage it sometimes leaves behind. It is a pattern older than Hollywood itself, as the enduring fascination with Marilyn Monroe's tragic legacy reminds us.
Before reports of Chase's death began circulating publicly, a GoFundMe campaign appeared under her name. TMZ first reported Chase's death through Roy Hernandez, described as her boyfriend. Hernandez is also identified as the person who created the fundraising page.
The online fundraiser post stated, per the AP: "Many people know her as a talented childhood actor from Lilo & Stitch, Spirited Away, and Donnie Darko. But behind the scenes, she's faced more than her share of hardship."
Ryan, Chase's former manager, moved quickly to dispute the campaign. In a statement to Deadline, he said plainly:
"Daveigh's estate has plenty of means to pay for the cremation."
Ryan went further, challenging Hernandez's standing to act on Chase's behalf. "John is next of kin and never signed any paperwork over to this so called boyfriend," he told Deadline. He added that none of Chase's family or longtime friends had heard of Hernandez.
Ryan's most pointed accusation concerned the circumstances of Chase's hospitalization. He stated that Hernandez "brought her into the hospital in terrible condition and didn't let any of the family know until she passed so he can control the dialogue." Ryan said the GoFundMe page was started "on his own under Daveighs name when she was already unresponsive."
He urged the public not to donate:
"Myself, her father, her uncle and all of us close friends who knew her for decades are encouraging people not to donate to this page."
Ryan stated that Chase's family had contacted GoFundMe about the page and was urging people to report it. Whether GoFundMe has taken any action on the page is not clear from available reporting. Hernandez does not appear to have publicly responded to Ryan's statements.
The dispute adds an ugly dimension to an already painful story. Whatever the truth of the relationship between Hernandez and Chase, the family's alarm, and the fact that millions in residuals sat untouched while a stranger solicited donations, raises serious questions about who was looking out for Chase in her final months.
Sudden, devastating losses in the entertainment world are hardly rare. The recent death of Caitlyn Jenner's ghostwriter near a Los Angeles trail was another reminder of how quickly tragedy strikes in and around the industry.
Schwallier told NBC News via text that his daughter died of complications from bacterial meningitis and a blood infection. The Washington Times reported that the infection caused septic complications leading to organ shutdown. Chase had been hospitalized earlier in June for malnutrition.
No official medical examiner's report or death certificate has been referenced in any of the available reporting. The specific hospital where Chase was treated has not been named. How long she was hospitalized before her death remains unclear.
Her father's statement that she struggled with drugs beginning at age 13 puts the timeline of her decline into sharp focus. She was cast as Lilo at eight. Five years later, by her father's account, addiction had already taken hold. The New York Post's reporting on her alleged heroin and fentanyl use and the late-2025 footage from skid row suggest the problem only deepened over the following two decades.
The story carries echoes of other public figures whose private struggles ended in tragedy. The recent fatal shooting of Kansas City radio personality "Uncle Jimmy" was a different kind of loss, but it shared the same shock of a familiar public figure taken far too soon.
Chase's story is not the first of its kind, and it will not be the last. Hollywood has a long, well-documented history of consuming child performers, building them into brands before they can drive a car, then offering little institutional support when the work dries up and the problems begin.
The entertainment industry talks endlessly about mental health awareness and corporate responsibility. Studios and unions negotiate elaborate residual structures. SAG-AFTRA maintains trust accounts. And yet a woman who voiced one of the most recognizable characters in modern animation died malnourished and homeless, her earnings uncollected, her family cut out of her final days.
No amount of residual money matters if the person it belongs to is too deep in addiction to claim it. No trust account structure substitutes for the human connections that might have pulled Chase back from the edge. The institutional machinery existed. It did not save her.
The GoFundMe dispute may resolve itself. The family says it has the means to handle arrangements. The open questions, about Hernandez's role, about who knew what and when, about whether anyone could have intervened sooner, may never get clean answers.
Celebrity families are not immune to the kind of dysfunction and tragedy that afflicts ordinary households, as the disturbing case involving Rob Reiner's family has shown in recent months.
What is clear is the outcome. A little girl from Las Vegas landed a soup commercial, then a Disney movie, then a horror classic. She won an MTV award over some of the biggest names in film. And twenty-two years later, she died at 35 in a city full of people who knew her voice but not her name.
Hollywood will post its tributes. The industry will move on. The system that made Daveigh Chase a star at eight and lost her by thirteen will keep right on running, until the next child walks onto the lot.
