Riverdale Star Sentenced To Life In Prison
Ryan Grantham of Riverdale fame was been sentenced to life in prison for killing his mother.
Television network The CW hit it big when they launched a dark spin on a well-known comics series called Riverdale in 2017, starring a new generation of fresh-faced actors. The long-running series has gone from teenage murder mystery to full-blown supernatural horror plots in a matter of six seasons so far, with the seventh and final season of the show coming up sometime in 2023. Unfortunately for the series, many actors featured on the show have either passed away in real-life or face criminal charges for deeds done off the set, as is the case for Riverdale actor Ryan Grantham who was recently sentenced to life in prison.
According to a report by Deadline, Riverdale actor Ryan Grantham, best known for his performance on the show as Jeffery during the fourth season, has been sentenced to life in prison with the eligibility for parole in 14 years. The conviction stems from the 2020 killing of Grantham’s mother, a second-degree murder punishment that concluded this week in Vancouver’s British Columbia Supreme Court. The Vancouver-based Canadian actor had pleaded guilty to the crime of shooting his 64-year-old mother Barbara Waite in the back of the head on March 31, 2020.
Before Ryan Grantham starred in an episode of Riverdale, the 24-year-old performer had been working for many years as a child actor in Canada. Audiences would know a lot of his work from Vancouver-based television shows, which he tended to frequent like The CW’s Supernatural alongside Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles, the miniseries Riese, and the series Falling Skies. He had been nominated for numerous awards throughout the years, including The Leo Award which he was nominated twice for his performances in Becoming Redwood and the 2008 short film, The Anachronism.
While Ryan Grantham was on Riverdale, he played the character of Jeffery Augustine, who is ultimately responsible for the death of Fred Andrews, played by the late Luke Perry. In the show’s first episode of the fourth season, Jeffery hits Fred Andrews with his father’s truck while Fred was on the side of the road helping a woman stranded. The 2019 episode was created for the series as a way to explain Luke Perry’s character’s death because the actor had passed away earlier that year at the age of 52 years old, which stemmed from a series of strokes that plagued the former Beverly Hills, 90210 actor for about a week.
Ryan Grantham’s stint on Riverdale would end up being his last performance as an actor on television or in film, as the episode in question wrapped in 2019, and the incident involving the shooting of his mother occurred towards the beginning of the following year. While Grantham did not share many scenes with any other actors from the show, the series was renewed for a final season that is currently filming in Canada. The series stars Camila Mendes, KJ Apa, Cole Sprouse, and Lili Reinhart as embodiments of the famous characters devised from the Archie Comics like Archie Andrews, Betty Cooper, Veronica Lake, and Jughead Jones.
