In the final days of her life, a crowdfunding page appeared online, typed out by a boyfriend who had been living with her on the streets of Los Angeles. “Daveigh was diagnosed with meningitis and several serious blood infections,” Roy Hernandez wrote. “Her condition has become critical, and the doctors have told me she may not have much time left.” The appeal, launched while she lay unresponsive in a hospital, asked for help to give her a sense of home and peace. She died on 16 June, and within weeks the Los Angeles County medical examiner released a different account: the primary cause was acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), with chronic polysubstance use listed as a significant contributing condition. The death was ruled natural.

That clinical finding closed a narrative that had, for years, been written in fragments of police reports, estranged family statements and tabloid headlines. Her father, John Schwallier, initially told American media that she had succumbed to bacterial meningitis and a blood infection, adding that she had been homeless and severely malnourished. Her mother, in an interview with a British newspaper, described visiting her in prison after a burglary conviction and finding a daughter “completely gone, out of her mind,” a transformation she attributed to drugs that took hold after a motorcycle accident in 2016. Former manager John Ryan Jr. said he had not seen her in a decade, and that a missing-persons report was never filed because she had left of her own volition. Viewed from Los Angeles, the story was a familiar one of a child performer unmoored; yet the global response to her death revealed a far wider footprint.

Chase’s breakthrough year was 2002, when she was twelve. That summer she voiced Lilo Pelekai, the Elvis-loving Hawaiian girl in Disney’s Lilo & Stitch, a performance that won an Annie Award and anchored a franchise of sequels and television episodes. The same year she provided the English-language voice of Chihiro in Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, a film that would become one of the most celebrated animations of the century. And in October, she crawled out of a television screen as Samara Morgan in Gore Verbinski’s The Ring, a role that earned her the MTV Movie Award for best villain and seared a generation’s nightmares. It was a rare triple strike: within months, she had become a Disney heroine, a Studio Ghibli protagonist and a horror icon. News of her death rippled across continents, reported not only in the United States but in Spanish-language outlets from Mexico to Argentina, in Indonesian and Malaysian media, and in Brazil, where the film is known as O Chamado.

Behind the screen images, however, the trajectory was already fraying. By the mid-2010s she had largely stepped away from acting, her last credit a 2016 independent film. Arrests for drug possession and an incident involving a stolen vehicle made local news. Her mother told the Daily Mail that after a prison release, Chase fled before she could be collected, returning to the streets. The GoFundMe page set up by Hernandez drew sharp public criticism from her family and former manager, who urged people not to donate, alleging that he had controlled the narrative and not informed relatives until after her death. The family said they were handling arrangements themselves.

There is a particular cruelty in the way a performer’s most indelible moments can outlive the person who created them. For millions who grew up in the early 2000s, Lilo’s voice is still singing along to “Hound Dog,” and Samara’s jerky, waterlogged crawl remains a primal fright. The medical examiner’s report closes a file, but the images Chase left behind continue to flicker, untethered from the woman who, in the end, was found not in a film frame but in a hospital bed, her body exhausted by years of invisible struggle.