He was my brother. She was my sister. We were the kids of *Different Strokes* — America’s favorite TV family. The smiles, the hugs, the laughter on set.
Behind the cameras, we were even closer. She was everything to me. We clicked like real siblings, inseparable; she had this light that filled every room she walked into. But by 1997, the little girl who had charmed millions as Kimberly Drummond was fighting for a comeback.
She was 33 years old, divorced for eight years, and barely saw her own son, Tyler. The spotlight had moved on, and Dana was desperate to win it back. One morning, 18 months before her death, I watched her light up a TV studio again, laughing, joking, teasing us like old times. To the outside world, she looked great — healthy, upbeat, full of life.
It was hard to believe the dark clouds that were gathering. She’d always been fragile, you know? She never understood how much people actually loved her. Dana’s story started quietly.
She was born in Maywood, California, in 1964 to a 17-year-old mother who couldn’t keep her. Given up and adopted at just three days old, she was taken in by Kay and Dean Plato. But before she even turned four, her adoptive parents split, and her father walked out of her life. Her mother Kay poured all her love into that little girl.
They were inseparable, laughing, playing, doing everything together. Dana felt cherished — but the scars of being unwanted never fully healed. She buried them in the one thing that made her feel whole: performing. At seven, she started booking commercials.
She had that fresh-scrubbed, all-American look, and every Hollywood mom would groan when she walked into an audition. She could’ve been a figure skater chasing Olympic dreams, but her mother decided acting was the priority. In 1978, at just 12, she walked into the audition for a new sitcom called *Different Strokes* and lit up the room. The producers knew instantly: “That’s Kimberly.
”
We made TV history — a show about a wealthy white widower adopting two Black kids, and we were a real family. We hugged, we said we loved each other, and people had never seen anything like it on television. Dana reigned as America’s favorite sister. She had that X factor.
But Hollywood glamour hid something darker. Even in the early days, the pressure was crushing her. In 1979, when she was 14 years old, I came over to visit her one Sunday. She was downstairs with some school friends when she slipped into the spare bathroom.
She grabbed a handful of her mother’s pills, swallowed them with a glass of water, and collapsed. Her friends started screaming: “Dana, Dana, help! She’s taken all these pills! ”
They called 911 and rushed her to the hospital.
It was a horrible, horrible day. She was already a star, and already she was trying to escape. By 1981, when she was 16, Dana fell into a whirlwind romance with rock and roll guitarist Lanny Lambert. They married a year later, and in 1984, their son Tyler was born.
She adored that boy. I honestly believe he doted on her, too; he loved his mommy. But the network decided Dana’s pregnancy didn’t fit the wholesome image of Kimberly Drummond. So they let her go from the show.
That destroyed Dana. That was her escape, her happiness, her identity. When it was gone, she lost everything at once. Her career was gone.
America’s favorite girl was gone. Then her mother Kay died of scleroderma. And that same week, her husband Lanny left her. Dana felt completely, utterly alone — and she fell apart.
Alcohol. Cocaine. She’d been experimenting since her early twenties, and soon she was spiraling. She lost custody of Tyler because she felt her ex-husband could give him more stability.
Her career bottomed out into B-movies, Playboy, softcore porn. Everything her life had stood for seemed to be slipping away. In 1991, her alcohol addiction led to one of the most notorious moments of her life. She walked into a Las Vegas video store, pulled a pellet gun from under her jacket, and demanded money.
The cashier looked at her and said, “You’ve got to be kidding. ”
“No,” Dana replied. “Do I look like I’m kidding? ”
She got $164.
She was arrested within hours. It was a cry for help — everyone knew it. The pressure drove her to a psychiatrist who put her on Valium. She told me herself: “I started taking these Valiums and quickly became addicted.
” It got so bad she stole a prescription pad, forged a doctor’s signature, and got a thousand Valium tablets. That led to another arrest and a suspended sentence. She kept saying: “I need help. I’m sick.
I really need help. ”
Friends had their doubts about how sober she really stayed. She claimed ten years of sobriety, but there were gaps that didn’t match up. She claimed she stopped drinking, but the pills — the Valium, the other medications — never fully left her system.
We were just trying to smash all the emotions and feelings we were dealing with. None of us knew how to deal with it correctly. By February 1999, less than three months before she died, Dana was living in a Winnebago in Florida with her new fiancé, Robert Manaka, a younger construction worker she’d met in a whirlwind romance. She seemed hopeful, focused on a comeback, planning for the future.
No one saw suicide in her. But there were warning signs. The autopsy report detailed two scars on her right wrist — likely from past self-harm. And her toxicology report showed elevated levels of Valium.
Long-term abuse of that drug increases the risk of both overdose and suicide. In May 1999, an events promoter named Shane Bugby flew Dana to New York. He’d booked her to appear at an alternative arts event, and he wanted her to promote it on the Howard Stern radio show the morning of May 7. I begged her not to do it.
I said, “Dana, you’re sensitive. You don’t know how to handle that show. Please don’t do the show. ”
But she went.
Howard asked her straight if she’d been on drugs. She denied everything — no cocaine, no crack, not for over a decade. She was obsessed with looking clean, and she called me before the show, asking how she looked, desperate to be seen as the old, wholesome version of herself. She wasn’t honest with him.
And Howard’s fans knew. The phone lines lit up with callers accusing her of lying, calling her an ex-druggie, an ex-con with unresolved mental health problems. One caller told Howard to throw her out of the studio. She was this fragile flower, a deer in the headlights.
And those listeners tore her apart, feeding on her pain. I could hear her getting more and more upset on air. Afterward, she called Shane and asked, “How did I sound? How was I?
” She was devastated. She needed acceptance so badly — it was almost like she needed others to accept her before she could accept herself. The next day, May 8, 1999, was Mother’s Day weekend. Dana flew to Moore, Oklahoma, where her fiancé Robert picked her up and took her to his mother’s house.
She planned to celebrate with Tyler, her 14-year-old son, the next day. But she was exhausted. She told Robert she needed to relax in the RV. So she took a cocktail of medications — the painkiller hydrocodone for her recent wisdom tooth extraction, plus other pills, including carisoprodol, a muscle relaxant.
That afternoon she climbed into bed. Robert joined her later and noticed she was cold and clammy, so he covered her with a blanket and snuggled up next to her. Around 8:30 that evening, Robert stirred. Dana wasn’t breathing.
She was unresponsive and cold to the touch. There was vomit at the corner of her mouth. He screamed for his mother: “Mom! Mom!
She’s not breathing! ”
Marcela Manaka, a nursing assistant, administered CPR as best she could, but by the time paramedics arrived, Dana was unconscious and not breathing. They rushed her to the Southwest Medical Center in Oklahoma City, where she was pronounced dead at 9:30 p. m.
She was 34 years old. In the first forty-eight hours, the media called it an accidental overdose of prescription medication. But when the autopsy report came out, the verdict changed: suicide. The medical examiner found toxic concentrations of carisoprodol and hydrocodone in her blood.
What was most telling to me was the contents of her stomach — the equivalent of seven large carisoprodol tablets, still unabsorbed. That was far more than a normal dose. The medical examiner ruled this an acute intentional overdose — a deliberate act of suicide. But I’ve always questioned that.
Dana left no suicide note. Those of us who loved her couldn’t believe she’d take herself away from Tyler. She had everything to live for — a career on the comeback, a fiancé, a future. The toxic mix she took was the same combination that recreational users in the ’90s nicknamed “the Holy Trinity.
” Was she just trying to get high and escape the pain? Did she simply lose track of how much she was taking? I know she was tired. I know she was hurting.
I know she was fragile. I also know that the law enforcement officers who first responded, who spoke with firsthand witnesses, felt confident enough to call it an accidental overdose. On balance, I think Dana didn’t intend to die. I think she was just trying to kill the pain of that day, get some sleep, and wake up in the morning to start over.
But the drugs in her system slowed her breathing, filled her lungs with fluid, and stopped her heart. There was simply no coming back for her. She never realized how many people truly loved her. She had the love, the adoration, the career, the family — and then, in the blink of an eye, it was all gone.
She was so self-aware of how the public saw her that she never gave herself permission to become who she really was. She was beholden to that identity she started with. I miss her laugh. I miss her giggle.
I miss her corny jokes and the way she’d come up and give me a kiss on the cheek. I miss all of that about Dana. At her memorial, a butterfly came down and landed on her urn. I know that was her.
A beautiful butterfly, gone too soon.
