Alicia Witt is setting the record straight about the circumstances surrounding the death of her parents, Robert and Diane Witt.
Robert, 80, and Diane, 75, were found dead inside their Massachusetts home on Dec. 20. At the time, the Worcester Police Department told E! News that there were no signs of foul play, but an investigation was launched into the matter. An official cause of death has not yet been released.
Now, a month after the couple’s tragic passing, Alicia spoke out to address “misconceptions” about her family. Calling Robert and Diane “deeply kind, curious, intuitive, wise, young at heart, funny,” the Walking Dead actress shared in a Jan. 25 Facebook post, “the circumstances around my parents’ sudden passings have become fodder for press, and there are some misconceptions rolling around—understandably so.”
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“this is very delicate for me to write because i’m wanting to honor their privacy, which they held so tightly,” she explained. “there’s an awful irony in the fact that, because of the very lengths they went to in order to protect their privacy in life—that privacy has been stripped away in death.”
According to Alicia, her parents were “fiercely stubborn” and private people who often refused her help with repairs on their home. As a result, Alicia was not able to step inside “for well over a decade” and “every time i offered to have something repaired for them, they refused to allow workers into their house.”
“i begged, cried, tried to reason with them, tried to convince them to let me help them move—but every time, they became furious with me, telling me i had no right to tell them how to live their lives and that they had it all under control,” she explained. “it was not for a lack of trying on my part, or the part of other people who loved them.”
Noting that her parents “were not penniless,” Alicia said Robert and Diane “made choices” that she didn’t agree with and she eventually stopped “short of petitioning the court system for taking control of two otherwise very sharp, very independent, very capable adults.”
“they were a united, intertwined, indivisible force, determined to do things their own way,” she said of her parents. “knowing they had each other—battling them the way i would have had to in order to do this truly felt like it would have destroyed them.”
Shortly before their death, the heat in Robert and Diane’s home went out, according to Alicia; she said she “will never understand how or why they made the choice not to tell me this.”
Per local outlet Boston 25 News, authorities suspect that Robert and Diane died of hypothermia. E! News has reached out to the Worcester Medical Examiner’s Office and the Worcester Police Department for comment.
In her tribute to her late parents, Alicia wrote that her “heart is broken” as she deals with “overwhelming floods of grief” in the wake of their passing.
“and even if i could have had a crystal ball and looked into the future—if i could have said to them ‘you are going to break my heart and the hearts of all who love you with a worst-case-scenario ending if you don’t let us help you’—i still think they would have made the same choices,” she wrote. “they weren’t willing to make different ones.”
Alicia added, “our last words to each other were ‘i love you’. that part was simple; never in doubt. they loved me so. i loved them so.”
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