From Child Star to Skid Row: The Tragic Estate Left Behind

There’s something deeply unsettling about the disconnect between what the world saw and what was really happening. Daveigh Chase, the voice of Lilo in Disney’s Lilo&Stitch and the haunting child actress in films like Donnie Darko and The Ring, left behind a $400,000 estate—even as she spent her final years living on the streets of Los Angeles.

It’s not the money itself that’s jarring. It’s what it represents: assets accumulated during a childhood and young adulthood in the spotlight, sitting untouched while the person who earned them struggled in plain sight. Court documents filed on July 8 show that Daveigh’s mother, Cathy Chase, petitioned to become administrator of her daughter’s estate, which contained $400,000 in personal property but no real estate. The probate hearing is set for August 12 at Los Angeles County Superior Court.

The details paint a picture of a life that spiraled in ways her supporters desperately wanted to help with—but couldn’t. A source close to Daveigh revealed that friends and colleagues reached out repeatedly over the years, offering assistance, but she wasn’t receptive. Her childhood friend Amy Castle summed it up on July 8:“Things absolutely could have been different”if Chase had been willing to confide in others. Castle knew her from age 9 to 16 and expressed certainty that the young girl she remembered“would never have wanted her life to go the way it went.”

According to a Los Angeles medical examiner’s report obtained on June 29, AIDS was listed as Daveigh’s primary cause of death at age 35, with chronic polysubstance use noted as a contributing factor. Her boyfriend, Roy Hernandez, initially told TMZ on June 17 that she’d been battling meningitis and blood infection leading to sepsis. The nature of her illness and the struggles she faced are complex, but what emerges from the accounts of those who knew her is a picture of someone who needed support but couldn’t—or wouldn’t—accept it.

Castle’s reflection on that gap is perhaps the most sobering part of this story. She observed that without proper support, people sometimes compartmentalize their pain or turn to substances as a coping mechanism. It’s clinical language for something heartbreaking: a gifted performer whose voice brightened Disney films, whose talent was undeniable, ended up isolated and unwell, with nearly half a million dollars sitting in an estate while she had nowhere to live.

The question lingering after all this isn’t really about the money. It’s about how someone with so much visibility in the entertainment world could become so invisible to the safety nets that should have caught her—and why, even when people tried, the connections couldn’t hold.