Matthew Perry’s final words before fatal ketamine overdose revealed in court documents
Five people have been arrested and charged in relation to the actor’s death
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Official court documents have disclosed Matthew Perry’s last words before he died.
The Friends star, 54, who passed away in October last year from “acute effects of ketamine” was reportedly using the powerful anesthetic for infusion therapy to treat his depression and anxiety.
Perry had asked his long-term assistant Kenneth Iwamasa to administer ketamine three times on the day he died, with his final message relating to the fatal dose.
According to court documents obtained by NBC News, Perry asked Iwamasa to “shoot me up with a big one” in the hours before he was found unresponsive in his hot tub.
The court papers were reported on after Iwamasa, 59, and four other people were arrested and charged with providing the actor with the ketamine that killed him on Thursday (15 August).
At a press conference, US attorney E Martin Estrada said the suspects include Perry’s personal assistant, two doctors, and a North Hollywood woman known as “the Ketamine Queen”.
According to an indictment unsealed in Los Angeles federal court, Perry’s assistant, Iwamasa, and an acquaintance of Perry’s, Erik Fleming, worked with two doctors, Salvador Plasencia and Mark Chavez, to procure large quantities of ketamine for Perry in the period leading up to his overdose death. However, “Ketamine Queen” Jasveen Sangha is charged with supplying Perry with the ketamine doses that ultimately caused his demise, Estrada said.
The documents state that Perry had asked Iwamasa to administer his first dose of ketamine at 8.30am on 28 October. He then received his second dose four hours later while watching a film at his $5.3m (£4m) home in Los Angeles.
He then asked Iwamasa to give him a third dose and get his hot tub ready. Perry’s personal assistant then left the house to run errands and returned to find him dead.
Dr Plasencia had previously administered ketamine to Perry and in September taught Iwamasa how to inject him with the drug, leaving the anesthetic and a supply of syringes behind for him in exchange for $4,500 (£3,476), according to the indictment.
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At the beginning of October 2023, the indictment says Iwamasa texted Plasencia an order for eight vials of ketamine, referring to them as “eight bottles of dr pepper”.
Dr Plasencia saw Perry as a cash cow, the indictment suggests, citing text messages he sent to Chavez about a month before the actor’s death. “I wonder how much this moron will pay,” he wrote in one. “Let’s find out,” he wrote in another.
According to Iwamasa’s plea deal, he had been administering ketamine to Perry for about a month before his death.
On 12 October last year, Plasencia injected Perry with “a large dose of ketamine” that unexpectedly caused the actor to “freeze up”. His blood pressure spiked, rattling the doctor, according to the indictment.
When Plasencia began having supply issues, Perry’s go-betweens branched out to Sangha, who said she had a “master chef” cooking up ketamine for her, the indictment states. And since Perry bought a lot of her product, Sangha provided him with ketamine lollipops as an “add-on”, the indictment states.
In the days leading up to Perry’s death, Iwamasa administered at least 15 shots of ketamine to him, all of which were supplied by Sangha, according to the indictment. It says Iwamasa gave Perry the final three doses of ketamine purchased from Sangha, using needles provided by Plasencia, on 28 October 2023, the date the actor was found dead in his hot tub.
After a medical examiner ruled his death an accident last year, Perry’s death was considered a closed case. Almost seven months later, however, an investigation, at both federal and local level, had been opened into who supplied the Friends actor with the ketamine that caused his death.
The investigation into how Perry came to have so much ketamine involved the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), and the US Postal Inspection Service (USPIS), the LAPD confirmed in May. His autopsy, released in December, found that the amount of the drug in Perry’s blood was in the range used for general anesthesia during surgery.
Yet his last infusion therapy was one and a half weeks before his death. The coroner noted that the ketamine in Perry’s system “could not be from that infusion therapy, since ketamine’s half-life is three to four hours, or less”.
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