Corey Haim’s mom says the LA coroner called her this morning to give her a heads-up that her son died of pulmonary congestion.
Judy Haim told Maria that she received an early courtesy call from the LA County Coroner’s Office who told her that an autopsy found her son had an enlarged heart and his lungs were filled with water. His cause of death was due to pulmonary congestion.
The Coroner’s Office also told Access that prescription bottles containing four different medications were taken from his room. His mother and manager told the Coroner’s Office those medications were the only ones he was taking, but the Coroner could not confirm if the medications were found in his body.
I don’t know anything about pulmonary congestion, and I’ll wait to weigh in on this until we have a report from the actual LA coroner.
Meanwhile, folks are coming out of the woodwork to talk about Haim and his struggles with drug addiction. Up now: Some actress named Tiffany Shepis who was engaged to Corey. (Actually, Tiffany appears to be a very successful horror flick star. Her IMDB page goes on forever, although you’ve never heard of a single one of her movies.)
The 30-year-old horror film actress and former E! Wild On guest host first met the Lost Boys star “years ago.” When his substance abuse became a problem, she bent over backward to try to help sober him up.
“I was trying, like everyone wants to do, to be Mother Teresa and help somebody, like Corey [Feldman] did and tons of other people in the past,” she says. “I moved him out to Arizona thinking it would help and get him away from everything and the people who were setting him up to fail.”
Shepis claims she’s a “pretty big advocate against” taking drugs, but it wasn’t until she realized she was unable to force Haim to change that she knew she had to put an end to the relationship.
“It didn’t work out,” she says of the move to Tucson. “I broke everything off before he left. There was just no progression, and if somebody doesn’t want to get better…”
The pair regained contact when Haim returned to Los Angeles in early 2009, but stopped speaking six months ago.
“I would go back and forth,” she says of their communication. “I would get insane phone calls, insane emails. Like stuff that you can’t even imagine a person saying to another person. And then I would run into him and he would look half OK and look like he’d gained some weight. I think he had like little mini, two-week instances of sobriety and then hard-core falloffs.”
Shepis says the star’s weapon of choice was typically prescription meds rather than illegal drugs.
“It was only pills,” she says.
It always seems so distasteful when people clamor for TV time after a loved one has passed away. But I guess I wonder what I’d do in the same position. Do these people go into these interviews thinking they’re doing the right thing — taking a chance to eulogize their deceased loved one and remind the world of how loved he or she was — and then get steered off-course by tough interview questions? Or are they all like “Fuck yeah someone died and now I get to be on TV!!!” Or is it somewhere in between?
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