The Daily Mail out of The UK recently spoke with filmmaker Erik Angra, who is directing the documentary which was being shot prior to the death of Joanie “Chyna” Laurer.
During the interview Angra addresses what appears to be a black eye in Chyna’s last video she posted on YouTube, and Angra said he believes she might have fallen “considering the substance she was on”.
“I remember when that happened, she sent me a photo, and honestly I just think she fell,” Angra said. “From the picture you can see a kind of friction rash on her face. It doesn’t look like somebody hit her because your skin wouldn’t drag that way.
“Later on it looked like a black eye but the first day it just looked like she fell and knowing the substance she was on I wouldn’t be surprised if she would fall and not remember it.”
“She was having a tough time the past couple of weeks and we all knew that and she was using more of her prescriptions than she should have been or mixing them up – I can’t say for sure exactly what she was doing. But I know we wanted to help her and we were trying to – but I guess we just weren’t able to help her in time. I knew she was struggling and had lots of things troubling her but I wouldn’t describe her as suicidal and we talked on the phone almost every day.
“She left me a voicemail on Sunday night actually – it was a five-minute-long voicemail and she was saying she actually felt good and she wanted to see a doctor next week and get her prescriptions. She seemed upbeat – certainly not suicidal – she was making a lot of plans for the future. She was sending out all these videos – that she thought were funny videos but in retrospect they are quite sad. One was her trying to do the scene from Psycho and stuff like that.”
“We did our final interview then – she was really upset about a few things and wasn’t in a good place emotionally so I went over there and we filmed her for hours,” he said. “She just had a lot to say and was very upset. It was a combination of things from her past and current troubles. I know she had been drinking and I think she was upset with things that were going on.”
As noted, in an interview with The New York Daily News last week, Chyna’s manager and best friend Anthony Anzaldo said he found Chyna dead in her bed last Wednesday. He added no illegal drugs or alcohol were found in her apartment, but there were prescription bottles for for Ambien and an anti-anxiety medication similar to Xanax.
Nick was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, and lived there until the age of 18, when he decided to pack his flack jacket and move to New York City.
