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Everyone knew that Brian Hickerson was bad news.
As we process the tragic death of Hayden Panettiere, we’re learning more about her life. Including her secret reconciliation with her abusive boyfriend.
Her neighbors feared Hickerson so much that he HOA put up warning signs urging anyone to call 911 if they saw him on the property.
Neither that nor the no-contact order were enough to keep this terrible man out of her life.
If they saw him, they were supposed to call the police
TMZ reports that there were warning posters featuring Hickerson’s face around the West Hollywood condo where Hayden Panettiere previously lived.
The signs instructed residents to bar him from the building and to contact police if anyone saw him on the property.
This came after a series of complaints and years of disturbances involving Hickerson.
Panettiere purchased the condo when she moved from New York.
Hickerson, who was arrested and even pleaded no contest to punching Panettiere in the face, had a no contact order against him. Even so, he apparently lived there for the past two years.
TMZ spoke to Mia Terrazas, who lived just one door down from Panettiere’s condominium home.
According to her, the HOA posted public warnings about Hickerson in August of 2025.
Terrazas reported feeling frightened of Hickerson and believed that he was dangerous.
(His criminal history and his text messages show that her fears were warranted.)
She also shared that the HOA took down the warnings after only about a week — for some reason no longer believing that Hickerson was dangerous.
What happened?
The narrative about the HOA and the warning sign about Brian Hickerson seems to suggest a sad, familiar story.
Hypothetically, an HOA would put up a sign like that if a person were either a threat to the property as a whole (such as an arsonist) or to one of the property’s residents (such as a girlfriend whom he saw as a target for physical violence).
In the case of Hickerson, his criminal record does not show a propensity for arson. The same cannot be said about domestic violence.
One might assume that he and Panettiere split and he either made threats or took violent action as a result.
Unfortunately, tragically, the HOA might have only taken down the posters if Panettiere had tragically reconciled with him. This is unconfirmed, but it is what many are assuming.
Abusers tend to be very manipulative. The physical violence that they inflict upon their partners is only one of the tools that they use in order to gain a sense of control.
Hickerson was not the first man accused of using Panettiere as a punching bag. He was, however, the last.
The public dislike of him — borne only of an understanding of who he is and what sort of person he has chosen to be — was such that Panettiere was advised to conceal their reconciliation while selling her memoir.
Had Panettiere’s life been free of awful men, there is a chance that she could have lived.
However, there were signs of an alleged overdose. Some speculate that Panettiere relapsed into multiple bad habits — with Hickerson being one of them, and not the cause of the other.
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