Death
On September 11, 2003, Ritter fell ill while rehearsing scenes for the second season of 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter. Ritter was taken across the street to Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center, where he died later that evening, at approximately 10:45 pm PST from an aortic dissection caused by a previously undiagnosed congenital heart defect. He died six days before his 55th birthday.
Yasbeck filed a $67 million wrongful death suit against radiologist Dr. Matthew Lotysch and cardiologist Dr. Joseph Lee. Yasbeck accused Lee, who treated Ritter on the day of his death, of misdiagnosing his condition as a heart attack, and Lotysch, who had given him a full-body scan two years earlier, of failing at that time to detect an enlargement of Ritter's aorta. Both sides agree that Ritter's true condition—an aortic dissection, which is a tear in the largest blood vessel in the body—was not identified until right before his death.The trial began on February 11, 2008, in Los Angeles County Superior Court. On March 14, 2008, the jury concluded that Ritter's doctors were not negligent and thus not responsible for his death. According to court records, Ritter's family received more than $14 million in settlements, including $9.4 million from Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, where he died. Ritter was interred at Forest Lawn, Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles.
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“For God was as large as a sunlamp and laughed his heat at us and therefore we did not cringe at the death hole.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)