Ashley Judd describes cradling mom Naomi as she died

Country star Naomi Judd was still alive when her daughter Ashley found her with a self inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

In a harrowing essay in The New York Times, Ashley described how discovering her mother after her suicide in April was ‘the most shattering day of my life.’  

‘The trauma of discovering and then holding her laboring body haunts my nights,’ she wrote.

But instead of being able to comfort Naomi in her dying moments, Ashley said police officers harshly interrogated her and kept her from her mother.

‘I felt cornered and powerless as law enforcement officers began questioning me while the last of my mother’s life was fading,’ she wrote, ‘I wanted to be comforting her, telling her how she was about to see her daddy and younger brother as she “went away home,” as we say in Appalachia.’

Ashley revealed the heartbreaking details while announcing she was undertaking a ‘legal cause’ to prevent the public from having access to police records in sensitive and intimate personal situations.

‘I intend to make the subsequent invasion of privacy – the deceased person’s privacy and the family’s privacy – a personal as well as a legal cause,’ she wrote.

Naomi died of a self-inflicted bullet wound in April 2022 at the age of 76, the medical examiner’s office in Nashville confirmed last week.

According to the report Judd battled with ‘significant’ anxiety, depression and bipolar disorder.

The country superstar died of a self-inflicted bullet wound in April 2022 at the age of 76

Ashley said she was in a state of shock after she found her dying mother, and that police responding to the suicide pried deeply personal information from her that she would never have revealed if she knew the public would have access to it. 

‘In the immediate aftermath of a life-altering tragedy, when we are in a state of acute shock, trauma, panic and distress, the authorities show up to talk to us,’ she wrote, ‘Because many of us are socially conditioned to cooperate with law enforcement, we are utterly unguarded in what we say.’  

‘The men who were present left us feeling stripped of any sensitive boundary, interrogated and, in my case, as if I was a possible suspect in my mother’s suicide.’