The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner quietly removed Matthew Perry from its online database after announcing no cause of death would be revealed until the agency received the results of the "Friends" star's toxicology report.
The autopsy of Matthew Perry is complete, but it will be weeks before his cause of death is revealed to the public.
Perry passed away at the age of 54 on Oct. 28 at his home in Los Angeles, with his death certificate listing his time of death as 4:17 p.m.
The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner arrived at the home of the "Friends" star five hours later at 9:30 p.m., according to a spokesperson, and the following day announced an autopsy had been completed and the body of the "Friends" star had been released to his family.
This information appeared in the public online database maintained by the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner, which provides the date, place, manner and cause of death for all individuals who pass away in the county.
In the days after Perry's passing, the database listed his cause of death as "Deferred," which is standard for the agency.
The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner is currently operating with a backlog of about six weeks, though it could take much longer before information is released about Perry's cause of death.
Lisa Marie Presley died on Jan. 12, and the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner did not release her cause of death until six months later on July 14.
The Los Angeles Medical Examiner does not provide timelines on when they will release information, though a spokesperson did reveal that no determination would be made on Perry's cause of death until the agency received toxicological results.
Those results tend to take four to six weeks.
Then, after sharing that information, the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner removed Perry from its public database.
A search of his specific case returns a completely blank slate with no details filled in, and Perry also does not appear in search queries for individuals who died on Oct. 28 or individuals born on Aug. 19, 1969.
It is a rare move by the agency given the number of celebrities in its database.
Inside Edition Digital reached out to try and learn more about this decision on Friday morning but received an automated email that said the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner media relations unit was "closed for the weekend."
Perry, who shot to fame on the NBC sitcom "Friends," was laid to rest at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Los Angeles on Nov. 3 following a private service attended by his five famous co-stars: David Schwimmer, Matt LeBlanc, Lisa Kudrow, Courteney Cox and Jennifer Aniston.
In his 2022 memoir "Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing," Perry revealed that he almost passed away at the age of 49 and had been in a coma for two weeks due to his drug usage.
The actor very publicly detailed his lifelong struggle with addiction in that memoir, revealing that he had been sober for only one of the 10 seasons he shot "Friends" and at one time was taking up to 55 Vicodin per day.
Perry devoted most of his final years to spreading awareness about addiction, and working to alleviate the shame that is often associated with the disease.
He would later say in an interview with The New York Times that he "spent $9 million or something trying to get sober."
In that same interview, Perry spoke about why he eschewed the secrecy of Alcoholics Anonymous despite being very involved in the program and sponsoring three individuals at that time.
"It suggests that there’s a stigma and that we have to hide," said Perry.
