The tragic story of child star Dana Plato has an even sadder addendum- her 25-year-old son Tyler Lambert has committed suicide.
Lambert’s death came almost eleven years to the day on which his mother took her life after years of hardship following her run on 80’s sitcom Diff’rent Strokes. Plato played the character of Kimberly Drummond, but failed to maintain the same level of success when the show ended. She appeared in an X-rated movie ( Different Strokes: The Story of Jack and Jill…and Jill ) had run-ins with the law for a robbery and drug related incidents, and served thirty days in jail.
On May 7th of 1996, Plato appeared on Howard Stern’s radio show, attracting a large amount of verbal abuse from callers. The next day, during a trip in the RV she lived in with her boyfriend, Plato was found dead in what was ultimately ruled to be a suicide. Sources say that Tyler Lambert never truly recovered from the trauma of his mother’s death:
The National Enquirer reports that Tyler was so obsessed by his mother that he recently honored her by getting teardrop tattoos on his face with her ashes added to the ink. He also had a tattoo on his forearm with his mother’s name…
His grandmother told the National Enquirer “Tyler wanted to be with his mother.”
Lambert died on May 6th, reportedly of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
