Two days before Gary Coleman died, he suffered a head injury from a fall, and his “wife”, Shannon Price made a 911 call, which has been released. In the call Price said she’s not sure whether Coleman had a seizure or whether he hit his head and fell. She said he had just gotten home and was going downstairs to make some food for her and that she then heard a “big bang.”
“Send someone quick because I don’t know if he’s like gonna be alive cause there’s a lot of blood on the floor,” Price said “I don’t even know what happened. …I looked at the back of his head and it’s all bloody and gross,” Price said, later reporting to the dispatcher, “He’s conscious but he’s not, like, with it.”
Santaquin Police Chief Dennis Hammond has said Coleman had a dialysis treatment on the day of the 911 call. It’s unclear whether that may have been related to Coleman’s fall. The dispatcher asks Price to get a towel for Coleman to apply pressure to the back of his head.
“I’m just panicked I don’t know what to do,” Price said. “When are they (emergency services) going to be here, do you know?”
Coleman was conscious at the hospital that day but slipped into unconsciousness Thursday and was taken off life support Friday.
Then it was learned that Coleman and Price were actually divorced in 2008. So there was controversy as to the legality of Price’s decision to remove Coleman from life support. But the hospital said, “Mr. Coleman had completed an Advanced Health Care Directive that granted Shannon Price permission to make medical decisions on his behalf if he was unable to do so.”
However, controversy does not end! Now Gary Coleman’s parents, Sue and Willie Coleman, are saying that they are the legal custodians of his body because Coleman was divorced from his wife. His parents have said they learned about his hospitalization and death from media reports and that they had wanted to reconcile with their son before his death.
In 1989, when Gary Coleman was 21, his mother filed a court request trying to gain control of her son’s $6 million fortune, saying he was incapable of handling his affairs. The move “obviously stems from her frustration at not being able to control my life,” he said.
But former “Diff’rent Strokes” co-star, Todd Bridges is speaking out about a secret will that Coleman had. He told “Entertainment Tonight” that he is in possession of a document containing his old friend’s final wishes.
“[A friend of mine and I] have paperwork, and we’ll bring it out soon, that will show what his wishes were and what he wanted,” Bridges said. “There’s a big fight going on with his parents and some other people involved, and after we bring this paperwork out, everybody’s going to shut up.”
This is so sad, but it should not be surprising that there would be so much controversy after Gary Coleman’s death.