Daveigh Chase has died at 35 after meningitis and a blood infection caused septic issues that shut her body down. Roy Hernandez confirmed her death after TMZ reported she died on Tuesday, June 16.
The news is landing now because Chase had been admitted to a Los Angeles hospital earlier this month for malnutrition, making her death the end point of a short, serious medical decline. Hernandez had already created a GoFundMe to help with medical expenses before she died.
Chase was known first to many viewers as the voice of Lilo in Disney's Lilo and Stitch in 2002, then again in Lilo & Stitch: The Series, where she voiced the character for 67 episodes from 2003 to 2006. In the same year she played Samara Morgan in The Ring, a role that earned her an MTV Movie Award for Best Villain and fixed her in the minds of horror fans who saw her as far more than a child actor.
She kept working beyond those early credits. In 2006, she took on Rhonda Volmer in Big Love for 32 episodes, and her final credits came in 2016 with Jack Goes Home, American Romance and a voice role in Let It Die. That run matters because it shows a career that did not end with her breakout parts, even as her later years were marked by hardship and, in Hernandez's words, a struggle to find safety and happiness in downtown LA.
There is still one part of the story left unanswered: what led to the malnutrition that put Chase in hospital earlier in the month. For now, the record is clear on the sequence that followed — malnutrition, then meningitis and a blood infection, then the septic complications that took her life.
