Entertainment

NASSAU, Bahamas (AP) ― A planned jury inquest into the death of Anna Nicole Smith's son may be canceled if tests show that he died of natural causes, a legal official in the Bahamas said Wednesday.

Chief Magistrate Roger Gomez said authorities are reconsidering the need for the inquest into the death of 20-year-old Daniel Smith, which had been scheduled for Oct. 23 and was to include the former reality TV star among the witnesses.

At the same time, Gomez said that judicial officials have decided to dismantle the country's Coroner's Court and change the way inquests are handled as a way to end a backlog of cases — a move he said was unconnected to the Daniel Smith case.

Gomez, in an interview with The Associated Press, said pending toxicology tests may show that the death of Daniel Smith was not suspicious after all.

"If the results show that the cause of death was natural, then there will be no inquest," he told the AP.

Daniel Smith died Sept. 10 in a Nassau hospital room while visiting his mother as she recovered from giving birth three days earlier.

Bahamian authorities and a private pathologist hired by the family have said there was no evidence of homicide, nor that he committed suicide by overdosing on drugs, but have not released the cause.

The private pathologist, Cyril Wecht, has said Smith was taking a low dose of antidepressants at the time of his death, but that it would take several weeks to complete toxicological tests to determine why he died.

Two autopsies — one by the Bahamas coroner's office, another by celebrity pathologist Cyril Wecht — have ruled out suicide, foul play and several potential natural causes. Both have sought further tests to detect drugs or chemicals.


Wecht, who was hired by Anna Nicole Smith to perform a follow-up autopsy, said Daniel had been taking a "quite low" dosage of prescription anti-depression medication.

"It is possible we might be dealing with one of those tragic and cumulative and drug-related deaths where somebody inadvertently takes two or three different kinds of drugs, each of which has a central nervous system effect," he said Monday night on CNN's "Larry King Live."

Head Bahamian coroner Linda Virgill had scheduled the Oct. 23 jury inquest to determine whether there should be any criminal charges filed in relation to Smith's death.

Gomez said that Virgill had been reassigned and will now be part of a pool of magistrates who will handle death inquests. He said there had been complaints about the backlog at the coroner's office but declined to discuss the reorganization in detail.

The funeral home handling Daniel Smith's remains has not received the death certificate required before the body can be buried or flown back to the United States, said director Loretta Butler-Turner. The family has not yet decided how it wants to handle the remains, she said.

Daniel Smith, who appeared several times on the E! reality series "The Anna Nicole Show," was the son of Anna Nicole and Bill Smith, who married in 1985 and divorced two years later.

The coroner's office called the death "suspicious" because of Smith's young age and the lack of obvious cause.

Investigators say they did not find evidence of drugs or obvious signs of a crime in the hospital room. But police will continue their investigation until "we have exhausted all the angles and information we have," said Reginald Ferguson, assistant commissioner of the Royal Bahamas Police Force. "Until then, we plod on."

The name of the father of her newborn daughter has not been publicly released.

Anna Nicole Smith, a former Playboy model who went to the U.S. Supreme Court in a battle over an inheritance, came to the Bahamas during her pregnancy to avoid media scrutiny. She has been staying in seclusion at a guarded waterfront estate.

Smith married Texas oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall II in 1994, when she was 26 and he was 89. He died the following year and she has since been involved in legal disputes over the estate.

(© 2006 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)