/ 5 June 2009

Thai coroner seeks cause of David Carradine’s death

Thai coroners completed an autopsy on the body of David Carradine on Friday, a day after the actor was found hanging dead in his Bangkok hotel room.

Thai coroners completed an autopsy on the body of actor David Carradine on Friday, a day after the star of the United States television show Kung Fu was found naked and hanging dead in his luxury Bangkok hotel room.

Coroners at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn Hospital said they had not yet determined the cause of the 72-year-old’s death and were waiting for the results of a toxicology screen.

”We are now running tests and then we will decide the cause of death,” the hospital’s chief coroner, Nantana Sirisap, told Reuters.

”This certainly was not a natural cause of death,” she said.

A maid found Carradine hanging naked by a rope in the closet of his hotel suite at the plush Swissotel Nai Lert Park hotel on Thursday, police said.

Investigators said there was no indication other people had been in the room, where Carradine had stayed during the shooting of a film called Stretch.

Police and forensics teams gathered evidence from the hotel on Friday and said it could take several weeks to find the cause of death.

”We are currently interviewing witnesses, film crew, hotel staff and the last person who saw David alive,” Lumpini police chief Colonel Somprasong Yentuam told Reuters.

”So far, no one saw anyone enter David’s room around the estimated time of death.”

A US embassy official in Bangkok said he had no details of the police investigation.

Carradine, from a family of performers and the eldest son of character actor John Carradine, enjoyed a long career on Broadway, television and in movies such as director Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Vol. 1 and Kill Bill: Vol. 2.

Family shocked
While some media reports speculated his death may have been a suicide, a spokesperson said neither they nor his family believed Carradine was capable of killing himself.

”His family is in shock,” said Tiffany Smith of Carradine’s management firm, Binder & Associates. ”They have the same belief we have. There was no way David did this to himself.”

Carradine wrote in his 1995 autobiography Endless Highway that he had tried to kill himself when he was five years old. The book also documented his alcoholism and extensive use of drugs, from LSD to cocaine.

A hotel employee, who gave her name as Oi, said Carradine was in good spirits on Wednesday evening, in the final few hours he was seen alive.

”He was in the hotel lobby, relaxing and playing the piano — he looked very happy,” she told Reuters television.

”He was surrounded by friends and hotel staff and looked like he was enjoying himself. He was always smiling.”

Carradine first starred on Broadway but made his mark on Hollywood in the 1960s in TV westerns such as Wagon Train, The Virginian and a TV version of the hit western movie Shane.

He was made most famous by his role in the US series Kung Fu where he played Kwai Chang Caine, a half-Asian martial arts specialist, which earned him an Emmy nomination.

The role of Caine led to parts in more than 200 productions and his turn as the villainous Bill in Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Vol. 2 led to his fourth Golden Globe nomination.

Carradine was married five times and had two daughters from previous marriages. — Reuters