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"Murphy Brown" Death Ruled OD
Robert Pastorelli told his personal assistant he gave himself vitamin B shots. But it was heroin that killed the former prime-time star.
Pastorelli, found dead in the bathroom of his Hollywood Hills home on Mar. 8, was felled by an accidental heroin overdose, the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office has ruled.
The forensic findings were posted Thursday on the Smoking Gun. The document is full of the sort of cold, exacting details that make CSI an engrossing drama and make real life sometimes the saddest saga.
Per coroner's officials, the actor, best known to audiences as the house painter-artiste on TV's Murphy Brown, died with a syringe in his right arm and a spoon and plastic bag "with a white powder substance" on the counter next to the sink.
The tattooed Pastorelli wore a white tank top, black pants and a toupee, the report said. His body was found slumped over on the toilet by his personal assistant, Mirna Ortiz.
Pastorelli, age 49 at his death, had spoken in the past of drug troubles, but he spoke of them as being just that--in the past. The star's business manager, Carlos Morgner, told police his client had been clean for 15 years. Ortiz said Pastorelli told her he injected vitamin B, a substance commonly administered to provide energy boosts.
The coroner's report, citing police investigation, paints a portrait of a man who was depressed, though not suicidal. Morgner told authorities Pastorelli didn't like the direction "his life was going in." A detective found that Pastorelli had been out of sorts since the 1999 death of his live-in girlfriend.
Indeed, Pastorelli's death came almost five years to the day that Charemon Jonovich accidentally shot herself in the head in their home. Jonovich was just 25 and the mother of their then-infant daughter.
Pastorelli, who'd been playing TV tough guys with regularity since the early 1980s, before finding breakout fame on Murphy Brown, worked less frequently in recent years.
At the time of his death, however, he had just completed a high-profile gig in Be Cool, a sequel to the John Travolta mob comedy Get Shorty. The movie is due out next year.
Pastorelli, a former boxer, bartender and bouncer who once joked he'd been voted by classmates as "most likely to die in a gas chamber," earned a 1995 Emmy nomination for his role as Eldin Bernecky on Murphy Brown. He was a regular on the series from 1988-1994.
In a 1997 interview with the Toronto Sun, Pastorelli said his unconventional coming-of-age years had made a survivor out of him.
"If that ever happens--that this is a dream and I wake up--I know I'd be okay," Pastorelli told the paper. "I'd be okay."
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