"Walking Dead" actress Alicia Witt finally broke her silence after police discovered the bodies of her parents in December following a problem with the heating system in their Massachusetts home.
The actress said she placed a welfare call when she could not contact her parents. Later, a detective told her over the phone that her parents were found dead.
Robert Witt, 87, and Diane Witt, 75, were found inside their dilapidated Worcester home. Police said that the elderly couple used a space heater to heat their home and had "furnace problems."
Authorities found the couple in their home a day before Christmas when temperatures were low. Police suspected that the couple died from hypothermia, a dangerous drop in body temperature due to exposure to cold for long periods.
Her parent's health had been on the decline as her father had cancer and her mother had Parkinson's disease.
Parents were stubborn, not penniless
Alicia revealed that her parents refused help and would not let her inside their home for "over a decade." Thus, she did not know how bad their place had gotten over the years.
"My parents weren't penniless; they were fiercely stubborn," the actress told Daily Mail.
On her Facebook, the actress wrote, "They were fiercely stubborn, beautifully original souls, and with that, they made choices - choices that I couldn't talk them out of."
She said that she helped them in any way she could, "in all the ways they would let me."
"I had no idea that their heat had gone out. I will never understand how or why they made the choice not to tell me this, not to let me help them with this," the actress wrote.
My heart is broken
Witt also revealed that she was about to petition the court system for taking control of her "very sharp, very independent, very capable adults" who were united and determined to do things their way.
She admitted that she "begged, tried to reason with them, tried to convince them to let me help them move," but the couple would become furious with her, not wanting her to tell them how to live their lives.
Neighbors report that they rarely saw the elderly couple, and they seldom answered the door. They have had heating problems since 2018 but declined an offer to fix it.
Their neighbors said Alicia was present in their lives, and she would send a car to pick them up whenever she was in the area.
Witt wrote that there had been several misconceptions surrounding her parent's death.
She honored the couple as "brilliant educators, deeply kind, curious, intuitive, wise, young at heart and funny." Her parents also valued their privacy so much.
She said that her last words to her parents were, "I love you." Alicia said she traveled to Worcester earlier this month for her parent's beautiful burial service and mourned and celebrated the life of the Witt couple in private.
