The founder of Celebrity Evangelist Ministries, a faith-based organization sharing the gospel with high-profile individuals, recently opened up on a 2024 encounter with the late Hayden Panettiere, who died of a cardiac arrest on August 16th. Tennessee-based Dylan Novak said while his conversation touched on purposeful topics like parenting and faith, he also said he walked away from their conversation feeling a profound sadness in the young actress.
For context, the star of such television hits as ‘Nashville’ and’Heroes’ was found unresponsive in her home after emergency personnel were dispatched. First responders could not ultimately revive her from cardiac arrest, whose cause has been speculated to have arisen due to an overdose though no official cause has been determined and/or released. Within an hour of arriving on the scene, she was declared dead. She was just 36 years old.
“One thing my wife and I immediately started talking about after we met her was what a sad presence there was about her,” a segment featuring Novak began. “My wife and I we went to Monroeville, Pennsylvania, to Still CityCon to meet Hayden Panatiere back in April 2024, and we had our daughter with us, and she was kind of one of the key points of the conversation with Hayden. Hayden was asking how old she was, which she was two, about to turn three at the time. Her daughter was nine at the time, and that just opened the door for her. Kind of talking about her past,” he said.
“I know a lot of news sources have been uprooting a lot of that past, a lot of the struggles she went through, both in relationships and motherhood, and it really seemed to help lower her walls. Talking about being a mother, you could tell she did love her daughter, and we were able to share the gospel with her, give her the material. This is before we were doing the embossed Bibles,” he continued.
“One thing my wife and I immediately started talking about after we met her was what a sad presence there was about her, and I’ve I’ve talked a lot about that the past week, and people have said, well, it was it was it something that you felt more so than others because when you’re around people who don’t know the Lord or searching for God, searching for Jesus, they you will feel that that longing, that searching around them, and but there was something different about Hayden. It was just she had a very tragic life from the from her childhood. She was bullied even as a young actress all the way up until her unfortunate passing,” he went on.
“And I’ve talked with multiple people who I personally know, who have worked with her, been around her, and all of them said pretty much the same thing. There was just such a kindness about her, but there was also such a heartbreaking sadness that also surrounded her,” he noted.
“So I was on a plane coming back from Kansas City, Missouri, when I got a text that she had passed away. I immediately in my mind, I thought of different events that Hayden had been at, and I’m like, “Well, I could have gone here. I could have done this. I could have done that. And ultimately, it’s too late for any of that,” he then stated.
“And we, we in our ministry, we did our part. We shared the word of God with her, but it just filled me with the fuel, the fire of the gospel of we need to keep doing this. This is why we do what we do because I think we all have the mindset when we see younger people. Hayden’s not that much older than me, and we have that feeling of oh, there will be plenty of time. We’ll see this person down the road, but really, nobody knows except the Lord, and that’s why it’s so important to make sure that we ourselves know for a fact where we are going to spend eternity, and then we continue to share that with everybody around us,” he finished.