WWE’s Chyna Died After Taking A Mixture Of Pain Killers, Sleeping Aides And Alcohol, Autopsy Report Confirms

A newly released autopsy report has confirmed that Chyna, the WWE star whose real name was Joan Marie Laurer, died in her home in Redondo Beach, California, last April, after taking several prescription drugs and alcohol. According to the report released by the Los Angeles County Coroner, a mixture of painkillers, sleeping aides and alcohol were found in her system.

People magazine reports that Chyna, 45, died soon after ingesting alcohol and a drug cocktail, including the painkillers oxycodone and oxymorphone, as well as benzodiazepine drugs Valium, nordiazepam (a muscle relaxant) and temazepam (a sleep medication).

The autopsy report also noted that there were several bottles of the prescription medication in her apartment at the time she was found unresponsive last April. Chyna, according to the report, was found with a “bloody purge and foam coming from her nose and mouth.” The coroner’s report said she had been dead for “a few days” before she was found.

Shortly after her death, her manager, Anthony Anzaldo, who found her unresponsive in her apartment, said that he believed she had overdosed on prescription medication. Anzaldo hadn’t seen or talked to her for several days, so he went to her apartment to check on her and found her unresponsive.

Anzaldo told People magazine that Chyna was taking prescribed sleep medication and anti-anxiety pills when she died. She was filming a documentary, The Reconstruction of Chyna, at the time. She was also planning to return to the ring after the project.

She was under emotional stress and it led her to self-medicate. She had shown signs of increasing reliance on the drugs over the months before she died, Anzaldo said. She had been self-medicating for about three weeks before she died, he revealed. But he insisted that she was not taking illegal drugs.

“She was inappropriately taking her legally prescribed medication over the course of two to three weeks. On Sunday night, her body had enough,” he said. “Her normal amount was one thing, but over the course of time she was increasing, and not properly.”

“She had been a little emotionally strained. She was really confronting some demons and she may have been taking a little bit more than normal.”

“Every couple of days she’d be a little bit off of her game, a little loopy, like maybe she had taken too much but she was still coherent,” he continued. “It looked like she died peacefully in her sleep, there were no illegal drugs, no alcohol, it wasn’t like her home was a mess.”

“At this time there’s no thought of it being an intentional thing,” he concluded.

Chyna trained in the mid-1990s at Wladek “Killer” Kowalski’s wrestling school in Malden, Massachusetts. She joined WWE — then the World Wrestling Federation (WWF) — in 1997, after meeting Paul “Triple H” Levesque and Shawn Michaels at a wrestling event in 1996. They wanted to bring her in as an enforcer. Vince McMahon was at first reluctant, reportedly because he was uncertain how the audience would react to a woman beating up male wrestlers. But she was eventually hired.

She became a founding member of the stable D-Generation X and WWE’s first female enforcer. She was also the first woman to ever compete in the Royal Rumble match and the King of the Ring tournament. She was the only female performer to ever hold the WWF Intercontinental Championship title. She scored singles victories over top male wrestlers, such as Triple H, Jeff Jarrett, Kurt Angle and Chris Jericho.

She also held the WWF Women’s Championship title.

When she left WWE, the company said in a statement that she left “a lasting legacy as the most dominate female competition of all time.”

[Featured Image by WWE]