‘Glee’ actor Mark Salling found dead
He was to be sentenced on child porn charges
Mark Salling, the former Glee star who pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography and was scheduled to be sentenced in March, was found dead Tuesday, an apparent suicide. He was 35.
Ed Winter, spokesman for the Los Angeles County coroner’s office, said Salling was found dead by the Los Angeles River in Sunland, Calif., the neighborhood in the San Gabriel Mountains where he resided. He was pronounced dead at 9 a.m. local time and an autopsy is pending.
The suspected cause is suicide by hanging, Winter said, but the final cause will be determined by autopsy.
Salling’s lawyer, Michael Proctor, confirmed his death to USA TODAY.
“I can confirm that Mark Salling passed away early this morning,” Proctor said in an emailed statement to USA TODAY. “Mark was a gentle and loving person, a person of great creativity, who was doing his best to atone for some serious mistakes and errors of judgment. He is survived by his mother and father, and his brother.”
Salling was scheduled to be sentenced in early March under a plea agreement reached with federal prosecutors in October in which he admitted to possessing pornographic images of prepubescent children. The agreement stated that a search warrant found more than 50,000 images of child porn on Salling’s computer and a thumb drive.
Salling, best known as Noah “Puck” Puckerman on Glee, was arrested in December 2015 after the LAPD’s Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force served a search warrant on his home in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains.
In May 2016, he was charged with receiving and possessing child pornography, the Justice Department in Los Angeles announced.
In the plea agreement, prosecutors agreed to ask a judge to sentence the actor to a term of four to seven years. He would have been required to register as a sex offender, pay restitution and abide by restrictions on where he could live.
Salling is the second former Glee actor to have died. Cory Monteith was found dead in a hotel room in Vancouver, British Columbia, in July 2013. He was 31. The local coroner determined Monteith’s death was caused by an accidental drug overdose due to a toxic mix of heroin and alcohol.