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How did Carrie Fisher die?
Carrie Fisher
October 21, 1956 — December 27, 2016
Los Angeles, California
Carrie Fisher died on December 27, 2016 in Los Angeles, California, aged 60. The official cause of death was sleep apnea and other undetermined factors; cardiac arrest. Readers have raised 2 theories about how it happened.
Carrie Frances Fisher was born in Beverly Hills to Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, which she described as being "born of two celebrities, like a product," and spent her life being funnier about it than anyone else could be. She was nineteen when she was cast as Princess Leia and sixty when she died, four days after going into cardiac arrest on a flight from London to Los Angeles. Her mother died the next day.
She wrote Postcards from the Edge, four other novels, three memoirs, and uncredited rewrites on more scripts than will ever be known. She talked about bipolar disorder and addiction on television in the 1980s and 1990s, when that was a career-ending thing to do, and made it not one. She had a daughter, Billie Lourd, with the agent Bryan Lourd, and a French bulldog, Gary, who went everywhere with her including the Star Wars press tour. She had finished filming The Last Jedi.
She asked that her obituary say she "drowned in moonlight, strangled by her own bra." It did.
Photos with Carrie
If you met her, this is where that photo goes. No one has added one yet.
The record
What is established, from the authorities and the people who were there.
Official cause: Sleep apnea and other undetermined factors; cardiac arrest. Manner undetermined. (Los Angeles County coroner, June 2017)
On December 23, 2016, about fifteen minutes before her flight from London landed at LAX, she stopped breathing. Passengers, one of them a nurse, performed CPR until paramedics boarded. She was taken to UCLA Medical Center and placed in intensive care. She died there on the morning of December 27. She was 60. Debbie Reynolds, her mother, had a stroke while planning the funeral and died on December 28.
The Los Angeles County coroner's report, released in June 2017, listed the cause of death as sleep apnea "and other undetermined factors," with atherosclerotic heart disease and drug use as contributing conditions. Toxicology found cocaine (which the report said had likely been taken about 72 hours before the flight), heroin, other opiates, and MDMA, at levels the examiner could not tie to the death with certainty. The manner of death was listed as undetermined.
Her daughter said afterward that her mother had "purposefully put it out there" that she struggled with addiction, and that she hoped the report would start conversations rather than end them.
What happened
The cause of death has been confirmed. The theories below are how readers understand it, and what people thought before it was known. Everyone here is anonymous.
Sleep apnea on a plane, a heart with disease in it, and a toxicology report with cocaine and heroin on it that the examiner wouldn't call the cause. What stopped her breathing over the Atlantic?
The page creator
- Confirmed49 of 53 readers find this likely
Sleep apnea in a sedated body at altitude, on a heart that couldn't take it
The coroner's finding, with the pieces assembled. She fell asleep on an eleven-hour flight with opioids in her system, her breathing paused as it did every night, the cabin's thinner air made the pause worse, and a heart with disease in it went into arrest instead of restarting. Any one factor might have been survivable. Together, over the Atlantic, they weren't.
Anonymous. Says they are a sleep medicine physician.
Confirmed by the Los Angeles County coroner, June 2017: cause as listed, manner undetermined.
- Also raised35 of 46 readers find this likely
The drugs did it and the report was written gently
Cocaine, heroin, other opiates, and MDMA in one toxicology report is not a background finding. Opioids suppress breathing; that is the whole mechanism of an opioid death. The examiner's reluctance to name a level as fatal is real, but a reader can see what's on the page. Her daughter, notably, did not dispute this reading.
Anonymous.
- Also raised18 of 34 readers find this likely
A heart attack, with the apnea and drugs as bystanders
She had atherosclerotic heart disease, which the report lists. A woman of 60 with narrowed coronary arteries can have a fatal cardiac event on a long flight without any of the rest. The coroner didn't find a fresh blockage, which is why this isn't the finding, but it's a reasonable reading of "other undetermined factors."
Anonymous. Says they are a cardiac nurse.
The confirmed cause carries this mark and stays at the top. Theories can still be added; they sort below it.
Sleep apnea is breathing that repeatedly stops during sleep. On its own it is rarely listed as a cause of death; it is listed when the examiner believes a pause in breathing, in a person whose heart and lungs could not tolerate one, led to cardiac arrest. Several things make a pause more dangerous: heart disease, opioids and other sedating drugs, and the lower oxygen in a pressurized cabin at altitude. She had all three.
"Undetermined" as a manner means the examiner could not say whether the death was natural, accidental, or something else. It is the honest answer when drugs are present but not at levels that by themselves explain a death, and when the person also had a disease that could have done it alone.
Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner, report released June 2017 Billie Lourd's statement, June 2017 Wikipedia, "Carrie Fisher"
Questions people ask
- What was Carrie Fisher's cause of death?
- The official cause of death was sleep apnea and other undetermined factors; cardiac arrest.
- When did Carrie Fisher die?
- Carrie died on December 27, 2016, at the age of 60, in Los Angeles, California.
- What happened to Carrie Fisher?
- 3 theories have been raised on this page and ranked by readers. The cause is settled; the theories are about understanding how it happened.
- Who else died in 2016?
- See everyone on Ohbit who died in 2016. Carrie was 60.
Add a theory
Say what you think happened and why. You’re anonymous. If you have a reason to know (you were there, you do this for a living), you can say so.