According to the Associated Press, Gary Coleman’s estranged parents abandoned their effort to bury him in his native Illinois Friday after a Utah attorney revealed the actor named an executor in a 1999 will.
“Of course it’s disappointing. We’d be inhuman if it wasn’t, but we’re not up for a fight,” Coleman’s mother, Sue Coleman, said in an interview with The Associated Press. “We just want him finally put away to rest.”
Gary Coleman died May 28 in Utah from a brain hemorrhage at age 42.
Salt Lake City Attorney Kent Alderman said he has a will Coleman wrote that he will take to a Utah County court sometime next week. The will was written before Coleman moved to Utah and met his future wife during filming for the 2006 comedy “Church Ball.” Alderman wouldn’t reveal details of the will, including the name of the executor, but said Coleman will not be buried this weekend.
Frederick Jackman, an attorney for Gary Coleman’s parents, said the person named in the will is Dion Mial, a friend and former manager of the former child TV star.
Sue Coleman and husband Willie Coleman had been seeking to take custody of their son’s body and return it to his boyhood home in Illinois once it was discovered this week that he had divorced wife Shannon Price in 2008. It was Price — who was named in an advanced health care directive — who ordered that Gary Coleman be taken off of life support.
His parents have said they learned about his hospitalization and death from media reports and they had wanted to reconcile with their son before his death.
Gary Coleman’s parents had been preparing to go to court, but Jackman said that’s no longer the case because they had seen a copy of the will naming Mial as its beneficiary.
Information from the Associated Press and Eurweb.com contributed to this report.