LOS ANGELES _ Amie Harwick, a well-known marriage and family therapist, died of blunt force injuries to her head and torso after she was attacked at her Hollywood Hills home over the weekend, Los Angeles County coroner officials said Tuesday.
Authorities allege that ex-boyfriend Gareth Pursehouse, 41, attacked the 38-year-old Harwick early Saturday morning.
LAPD officers were sent to the home in response to a report of a woman screaming. When officers arrived, they were met by Harwick's roommate who told them Harwick was being assaulted in the home. The roommate had jumped a wall to escape the house and call for help, police said.
Officers found Harwick on the ground, beneath a third-story balcony, with grave injuries consistent with a fall, police said. She was taken to a hospital, where she later died.
Investigators found possible evidence of a struggle in the home, according to a statement. Pursehouse, of Playa del Rey, was arrested on suspicion of murder and is being held on $2 million bail, according to county jail records.
Harwick and Pursehouse had shared a home for a couple of years a decade ago, friends said, but their relationship deteriorated and Harwick twice applied for restraining orders against him, according to court records.
Beverly Hills sex therapist Hernando Chaves, a close friend of Harwick, told the Los Angeles Times that she had run into Pursehouse at an event last month in what may have been a fateful encounter.
"It was the absolute worst possible luck," Chaves said. The chance encounter, Chaves said, seemed to "reignite his obsessive preoccupation with her."
Harwick first got a temporary restraining order against Pursehouse in 2011, but she apparently did not attend a follow-up hearing and the order was dismissed, an electronic docket shows.
Nine months later, Harwick was granted another temporary restraining order. After an April 2012 hearing, a judge granted extended the order, according to the docket.
Details including Harwick's grounds for seeking the restraining orders and the terms of the orders were not immediately available.
According to his LinkedIn account, Pursehouse has worked as a software developer and a photographer.
Harwick was previously engaged to TV star Drew Carey, and the therapist appeared in a 2015 documentary "Addicted to Sexting."
Carey said in a statement that he was "overcome with grief" over her death.
"Amie and I had a love that people are lucky to have once in a lifetime," he said. The pair dated for two years and were engaged before breaking up in 2018.
"She was a positive force in the world, a tireless and unapologetic champion for women, and passionate about her work as a therapist," he said.
