On Instagram, Cameron Boyce’s father shared a final photo of the actor that was snapped during their family outing. Hours later, Boyce fell asleep and suffered a deadly seizure. One sad detail included in the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s findings is that Boyce’s roommates tried to save his life (via E! News). Perhaps because it was early in the afternoon and they hadn’t seen him emerge from his room, “They decided to check on him,” the autopsy report read. At the time, they were about to head out the door. What they likely expected to be a quick check-in and goodbye took an awful turn when they realized something was wrong. They called for help and tried to resuscitate Boyce by performing CPR while waiting for an ambulance to arrive. But at 2:35 p.m., he was pronounced dead.
Boyce’s official cause of death was sudden unexpected death in epilepsy, or SUDEP. An epilepsy expert, Dr. Orrin Devinsky, told The New York Times that epilepsy sufferers are more likely to have seizures that are potentially fatal if they experience them while they’re asleep, which was what happened to Boyce. Devinsky further explained that the respiratory center of the brain can stop working during a bad seizure, so a lack of oxygen is usually what proves deadly in such an episode. Boyce’s autopsy report revealed that he was taking the medication Levetiracetam to prevent seizures but described his epilepsy as “non-traumatic.”
