Glee star Cory Monteith died of “mixed drug toxicity involving heroin and alcohol,” says the British Columbia Coroner’s Office.
Post-mortem testing, which included an autopsy and toxicological analysis, found that Mr. Monteith, aged 31, died of a mixed-drug toxicity involving heroin and alcohol.
The investigation into this death by the BC Coroners Service is continuing, and no other details are available at this time. It should be noted that at this point there is no evidence to suggest Mr. Monteith’s death was anything other than a most-tragic accident.
The BC Coroner’s Office, which seems both extremely helpful and unusually compassionate, also released this video:
Addiction is a killer, as Monteith himself told Parade magazine in a 2011 interview.
By [age] 13, Monteith—once a promising student who at age 5 could read at a fourth-grade level—was skipping school to get drunk and smoke pot. Monteith estimates that by the age of 16, when he quit for good, he had attended 12 different schools, including alternative programs for troubled teens. “I burned a lot of bridges,” he says. “I was out of control.”At that point, so was his drug use. Monteith admits, “Anything and everything, as much as possible,” he says. “I had a serious problem.”Afraid that he “could die,” his mother and a group of friends staged an intervention when he was 19. “That’s when I first went to rehab. I did the stint but then went back to doing exactly what I left off doing.”