Radio icon Casey Kasem passed away at the age of 82 surrounded by family and friends on Father’s Day. The sad news was posted on daughter Kerri Kasem’s Facebook page.
Kasem had been hospitalized for the past two weeks at St. Anthony’s Hospital in Gig Harbor, Wash. He passed away during the early hours of about 3:25 a.m. on Sunday.
Kasem suffered from Lewy body disease, a progressive dementia after Alzheimer’s.
In 2007, Kasem gave his three eldest children legal authority to act as his health care proxy when he could not make decisions for himself anymore. In the agreement, it stipulated he did not want to be kept alive with “any form of life-sustaining procedures, including nutrition and hydration,” if he lost all cognitive function and there was no hope of recovery.
Unfortunately, the time leading up to his death included ugly court battles between his three children from his previous marriage and his wife, Jean Kasem. They battled over control of Kasem’s medical decisions.
On May 7, Kasem’s wife removed Kasem from a Santa Monica nursing home and into a friend’s home in Washington State.
On June 1, Kasem was moved to a hospital by court order. Kerri Kasem was given temporary power of attorney over Casey Kasem in May and last week was given the authority to have doctors end his infusion of water, food and medicine.
Kasem began his career after graduating from Wayne State University in his hometown of Detroit. He started out in local radio and had a stint while in the Army for the Armed Forces Network before kicking into high gear as a radio host. He made everyone’s weekend that much more entertaining with his upbeat spirit as he ran almost four decades hosting countdown shows like “American Top 40” and “Casey’s Top 40.” Kasem also had a voice for TV, in the cartoon series “Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!” as the voice of Shaggy and in television commercials for brands like Oscar Mayer, Sears and others.
Kasem leaves behind his second wife and four children.
Funeral arrangements are not known at this time.
[Source: Kerri Kasem; CNN.]
Photo by Alan Light, via Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.