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By Movieguide® Staff
Daveigh Chase, the voice of Disney’s beloved Lilo and the face of one of Hollywood’s most chilling horror franchises, died June 16, 2026, in a Los Angeles hospital. She was 35.
“I would look at their list of unidentified bodies,” Cathy Chase, Daveigh’s mother, told reporters, describing the years she spent searching for her daughter by name on the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s website. “It was very difficult, but you do everything you can as a mother.”
Born in Las Vegas in 1990 and raised in Albany, Oregon, Chase landed the lead voice role of Lilo Pelekai in Disney’s animated LILO & STITCH in 2002, earning an Annie Award for Outstanding Voice Acting in an Animated Feature Production. That same year, she voiced Chihiro in the American dub of SPIRITED AWAY and played the terrifying Samara Morgan in THE RING, winning the MTV Movie Award for Best Villain.
She was 11 and 12 years old for all of it.
Movieguide® praised LILO & STITCH in its review, calling it a movie that “extols love, perseverance, commitment, faith, family, and redemption.” Lilo prayed for a friend who would not leave. The girl who gave Lilo her voice would spend the rest of her life looking for something to hold onto.
Chase worked steadily through her teen years, most notably on HBO’s BIG LOVE from 2006 to 2011, playing the manipulative child bride Rhonda Volmer. Her last credited role came in 2016. A motorcycle accident around that time led to painkiller addiction, which her mother described as the beginning of the end.
“She was seeking drugs and was partying with the wrong people,” Cathy told reporters.
“My daughter was never diagnosed with mental health other than PTSD. But the drugs took hold of her,” she added.
Addiction escalated to heroin and fentanyl. In October 2019, Daveigh was arrested on two counts of burglary.
Friends searched for her on Skid Row. She was eventually found living in an RV near that same neighborhood with her boyfriend, Roy Hernandez, just days before she was admitted to a Los Angeles hospital for severe malnutrition on June 3, 2026.
She died from bacterial meningitis, a blood infection and sepsis. Her body shut down.
Reports surfaced after her death that millions of dollars in unclaimed SAG‑AFTRA residuals — royalties from those childhood movies — sat dormant in an industry account. The system that made her a star had been holding her earnings the whole time she was disappearing.
Hollywood has a long history with child stars who arrive brilliant and leave broken, and Daveigh Chase is far from the first. That pattern, by now, is hard to explain as a run of individual tragedies. It looks more like a structural problem — an industry that knows exactly how to extract value from young talent and is far less practiced at protecting it.
Christian families watching LILO & STITCH or SPIRITED AWAY this summer are watching the work of a child who is now gone. Knowing her story — and asking who bears responsibility for it — seems like the least we can do.
Read Next: LILO & STITCH (2025)
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