Gypsy Rose Blanchard's Partner Kenan Urker Found Dead in Louisiana at 34

The Lafourche parish sheriff's office confirmed that Urker was discovered on Thursday after relatives asked deputies to conduct a welfare check at his home. According to a sheriff's office report obtained by the Guardian, Anita Blanchard, whose husband is Gypsy Rose Blanchard's half-brother, went to the residence with her husband and saw Urker unconscious through an outside window. A man who was with the couple entered through a window and found Urker unresponsive, not breathing and cold to the touch. The report said deputies could see Urker lying on his back in a bed from the living room area. Authorities then found syringes and a spoon in the bathroom next to a brown powdery substance, along with a syringe and a handgun on the nightstand beside the bed. Deputies noted Urker appeared to have been dead for an extended period, and the case was called in to the agency as an evident overdose. Captain Brennan Matherne of the Lafourche parish sheriff's office said in a statement that the death remained under investigation as of Friday. He also said investigators had not discovered any signs of foul play. In an interview with People published on Friday, the 32-year-old Blanchard said she believed Urker died from an overdose, though she did not know whether it was deliberate. She said he "was not in a good state of mind lately." In a Friday Instagram story, Blanchard said Urker had faced an unimaginable level of public scrutiny and relentless cyberbullying on platforms including TikTok and Reddit, and that she believed the weight of that harassment had a profound impact on him. She said she hoped his death would remind people that there is a real person behind every screen, headline and comment. Blanchard spent eight years in prison after pleading guilty to second-degree murder in the 2015 stabbing death of her mother, Clauddine "Dee Dee" Blanchard, in Springfield, Missouri. She gave her then-boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn, a knife and hid in a bathroom while he killed her mother; Godejohn was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The case drew widespread attention after it emerged that Dee Dee Blanchard had forced her daughter to pretend she was seriously ill and undergo unnecessary medical procedures. Blanchard met Urker while she was incarcerated, and he contacted her after watching the 2017 documentary Mommy Dead and Dearest, according to what she said on the We Need to Talk podcast in June. He proposed in October 2018, and the pair ended their engagement before reuniting in August 2019, later splitting for several years. During that time Blanchard married Ryan Anderson and later separated from him, announcing the split four months after her release from prison in late December 2023. She and Urker rekindled their relationship in April 2024 and welcomed their daughter, Aurora Raina Urker, eight months later.

entities: [