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The car plowed into the front of the 738-square-foot house before going through the living room, kitchen, home office, a closet and into the laundry room, immediately turning all of it into “a towering inferno” that would cause Heche to slip into a coma and die within days.
More than three months later, Mishele is making a claim against Heche’s estate for at least $2 million in the Superior Court of California in Los Angeles County, asserting that the actress’s “outrageous conduct and unlawful acts” left Mishele homeless, “completely traumatized” and without possessions both sentimental and needed for everyday life. She’s alleging negligence, trespassing and the infliction of emotional distress.
A lawyer representing the executor of Heche’s estate did not respond Tuesday to a request for comment.
The crash felt like “a record-breaking earthquake had hit, and [Mishele] was right in the middle and on the fault line,” the claim states.
Mishele and her three pets — dogs Bree and Rueben as well as a tortoise named Marley — escaped unscathed with help of fast-acting neighbors like David Manpearl, who told the Los Angeles Times that he was at his desk at home that morning when he saw a car fly by his window. Moments later, he heard the crash. Manpearl bolted out of his house, raced down the street and, when he saw that the car had barreled into his neighbor’s home, went inside. There he found a barefoot Mishele asking for help with her pets.
“She couldn’t move because the ceiling had come down, so there was all kinds of debris everywhere,” he told the paper.
Manpearl escorted Mishele to safety. He turned back to do the same for Heche, but the flames wouldn’t let him.
“It got to a point where there was fire everywhere. It was all around us,” he told the Times. “It had spread from the car to the house and the smoke was getting thick. I kept hoping that the fire department was there, but it hadn’t come yet, and eventually I had to leave the house for my own safety.”
Firefighters did come. It would take nearly 60 of them more than an hour to extinguish the flames that turned Mishele’s rental home to ruins. And although they managed to extract Heche from the wreckage, she soon slipped into a coma. She died a week and a half later.
After news broke that Heche was brain dead, Mishele posted a short video to Instagram calling it “devastating” and “a great loss,” especially for Heche’s children.
“My heart goes out for them,” she said. “This entire situation is tragic, and there really are just no words.
“I’m sending love to everybody involved.”
In the days after the crash, police said they were investigating the possibility that Heche had been driving under the influence, and in her claim, Mishele alleges that a blood analysis confirmed the actress had cocaine and fentanyl in her system. A representative for Heche declined to comment on Mishele’s allegations.
Although Mishele escaped physically unharmed, the events of Aug. 5 have thrown her life into chaos and scarred her psychologically, the claim states. It says the fire caused by the crash burned or otherwise destroyed Mishele’s “entire lifetime of possessions,” including her laptop, iPad, clothing and everyday household items, as well as her photographs and mementos.
In the months since the crash, Mishele can’t sleep and battles anxiety and depression, according to the claim. Because of her displacement and “fragile mental health,” she can’t run her business, which she’d operated out of her home. And although she’s been to counseling, she’s still traumatized by what she referred to in her claim as Heche’s “irresponsible behavior.”
People fixated on what happened to Heche, Mishele said in her claim, but the crash caused by the actress has left Mishele “unusually startled by hearing loud noises, plagued by nightmares and flashbacks of the incident, terrified of walking outside, and, atop that, without a place to live.”
Her former landlords, the owners of the house that burned down, have raised more than $183,000 for Mishele through a GoFundMe campaign. Late last week, Mishele posted another short video updating people about how things were going more than three months later.
“I’m still trying to navigate everything since the fire,” Mishele said, “still kind of wrapping my head around all of that and the aftermath.”
