Death of TV Host Is Ruled Suicide

The death of TV game show host Ray Combs, who hanged himself with a bedsheet last month in the psychiatric ward of Glendale Adventist Hospital, has been ruled a suicide.

Craig Harvey, chief of investigations for the Los Angeles County Coroner, said Monday that toxicology reports showed only therapeutic drugs in Combs’ system. Neuropathology reports showed that hanging, not injuries to the head, which he had received before his admittance to the hospital, had killed him.

The 40-year-old Combs hosted the game show “Family Feud” in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He had attempted suicide twice in the week before he hanged himself at Glendale Adventist, and was committed by police to the hospital’s psychiatric unit after behaving irrationally and threatening to harm his wife.

There, hospital officials put him on a suicide watch. Nurses checked him every 30 minutes at first, then every 15 minutes. But an orderly found him dead in his room at about 4 a.m. June 2. Glendale police said he hanged himself from a bar in a closet in his room. The bar was designed to break away under pressure, to prevent such acts by patients, but the safeguard did not work.

Combs, the son of a Hamilton, Ohio, steelworker, was known as a tireless campaigner on behalf of children and had served as the celebrity spokesman for the Boys & Girls Clubs of America.