Gary Coleman’s Friends “Appalled” By Ex-Wife’s 911 Call For His Fatal Fall in ‘Gary’ Doc: “She Didn’t Help Him”

The Gary Coleman documentary coming to Peacock tomorrow, Gary, will not leave viewers with a good impression of Coleman’s ex-wife, Shannon Price.

Director Robin Dashwood (barely) stops short of accusing Price of murdering her former husband in cold blood. But the final 20 minutes of this documentary, which will be streaming on Peacock on August 29, is spent dissecting Price’s unsavory 911 call on the day of Coleman’s fatal injury. It’s not a good look for Price, to say the least.

Coleman—the beloved child star known for playing Arnold Jackson on the ’80s sitcom, Diff’rent Strokes—died on May 28, 2010, at the age of 42, after Price made the decision to take him off life support. He’d been plagued by health issues his entire life, including treatment for a kidney disease as a young child, which stunted his growth to 4 feet, 8 inches. He underwent heart surgery in 2009, and began experiencing seizures and frequent hospitalizations shortly after. (Dashwood neglects to include these details about seizures, perhaps because it would detract from the film’s juicy-but-ultimately-unfounded theory that Price might have killed her husband.)

On May 26, according to Price, Coleman had another seizure—or simply fell—in the kitchen downstairs, while she was upstairs. She heard a bang, and came downstairs to discover that he’d had a seizure, fallen down, and hit his head. She called 911 and described to the dispatcher what certainly sounds like a seizure, including “bubbling at the mouth.” But it’s hard to defend her tone on the call, which seems to display little-to-no sympathy for her ex-husband, whom she divorced in 2008 but continue to live with.

On the recorded call, Price can be heard telling the 911 operator to send someone quickly, because she no longer wants to be in the same room with the severely injured Coleman.

“I just can’t be here with the blood, I’m sorry. I can’t do it. I just can’t.” Price says. “I’m gagging. I got blood on myself. I can’t deal. I don’t want to be traumatized right now.”

At one point, the 911 operator asks Price if she can ask Coleman to apply pressure to his head wound. Price responds, “No, I can’t. It’s like, all bloody, and I’m not trying to be—he’s not with it.” Later, Price can be heard on the call telling Coleman to stay still and apply pressure to his wound.

Brandi Buys, a friend of Coleman interviewed in the documentary, said she was “appalled” when she heard Price’s 911 call. “‘I can’t help him, because there’s blood?’ If you care about somebody, you don’t care about that,” Buys said. “She didn’t help him. She wanted somebody to get there and help him.”

Another friend and former business associate, Anna Gray, echoes Buys’ sentiment about the call. “She was more worried about herself than the person she was calling 911 for,” Gray said in the documentary. “I think her actions speak volumes, and I don’t have to say much more than that.”

Price defends herself and the call in the documentary, saying, “My 911 call was frantic. But I mean, it was a decent amount of blood, and it just freaked me out. I did not want to intervene with where the blood was, because I knew help was coming. It’s not that I didn’t help him. I helped him. Clearly, I helped him.”

Price faces even more criticism from Coleman’s friends interviewed for Gary for not riding with Coleman to the hospital, for choosing to take him off of life support after just two days, and for allegedly selling to Globe Magazine the last photo she took with Coleman: a selfie of her with Coleman on his hospital deathbed, with tubes protruding from his mouth.

“That’s how everybody is going to remember Gary,” Buys said. “Nobody looks good when they’re dying. But not everybody gets their final moment sold.”

Coleman’s close friend and former manager Dion Mial called the photo “one of the most depraved acts that I’ve ever seen perpetrated on another human being in my life.”

Price’s defense for sharing the photo? “I think that people needed to honestly see it, to see what he went through health wise,” she said in the film.

Ultimately, the local authorities found no evidence of foul play involved with Coleman’s death. This documentary offers no solid evidence to move the needle on that case. But it certainly does paint a picture of Price as callous, cold, and uncaring.

As Gray puts it in the film, “I think that legally, Ms. Price is covered, in terms of turning off Gary’s life support. But not morally.”