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NASSAU, Bahamas (AP) -- A planned jury inquest into the death of Daniel Smith may be canceled if tests show that the son of reality TV star Anna Nicole Smith died of natural causes, a legal official in the Bahamas said Wednesday.
Chief Magistrate Roger Gomez said authorities are reconsidering the need for the inquest, which had been scheduled for October 23 and was to include Anna Nicole Smith among the witnesses.
At the same time, Gomez said that judicial officials have decided to dismantle the country's Coroner's Court and change the way inquests are handled in the island chain as a way to end a backlog of cases -- a move he said was unconnected to the Daniel Smith case.
Gomez, in an interview with The Associated Press, said pending toxicology tests may show that the death of Anna Nicole Smith's 20-year-old son was not suspicious after all.
"If the results show that the cause of death was natural, then there will be no inquest," he told AP.
Daniel Smith died September 10 in a hospital room while visiting his mother as she recovered from giving birth three days earlier in Nassau's Doctors Hospital.
Bahamian authorities and a private pathologist hired by the family have said there was no evidence of homicide, nor that he committed suicide by overdosing on drugs, but have not released the cause.
The private pathologist, Cyril Wecht, has said Smith was taking a low dose of antidepressants at the time of his death, but that it would take several weeks to complete toxicological tests to determine why he died.
Head Bahamian coroner Linda Virgill had scheduled the October 23 jury inquest to determine whether there should be any criminal charges related to Smith's death.
Gomez said that Virgill had been reassigned and will now be part of a pool of magistrates who will handle death inquests. He said there had been complaints about the backlog in cases at the coroner's office but declined to provide discuss the reorganization in detail.
Daniel Smith, who appeared several times on the E! reality series "The Anna Nicole Show," was the son of Anna Nicole and Bill Smith, who married in 1985 and divorced two years later.
The name of the father of her newborn daughter has not been publicly released.
Smith, a former Playboy playmate, married Texas oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall II in 1994, when she was 26 and he was 89. He died the following year and she has since been involved in legal disputes over the estate.
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