Former co-star tried to rally Nickelodeon cast to help Kianna Underwood years before fatal NYC hit-run
An original “All That” cast member tried to raise the alarm that former child actor Kianna Underwood was homeless and needed help more than two years before the Nickelodeon actress was killed in a chaotic Brooklyn hit-and-run crash.
Angelique Bates took to Instagram in November 2023, after learning the young actress was homeless in New York City, to call on the show’s cast and Nickelodeon to help her.
“I don’t know what the whole situation is. You don’t know if there’s addiction. You don’t know if there’s mental illness. You don’t know what is at play right now,” she said, adding that fundraising wouldn’t be enough. “There has to be a plan to make sure that they’re getting all the proper assistance.”
Bates appeared on the first two seasons of the sketch comedy show and shared scenes with now-SNL star Kenan Thompson.
“She’s literally one of the babies,” Bates said “Any season that was after us, those were the babies…. those are the ones that looked after us.”
“If some of us are already out there acting like we are and that we’re, you know, big brothers, big sisters or whatever…. everybody deserves help, but don’t be selective,” she said in a live video. “She’s one of us, and she needs help, but she’s not getting it.”
She was particularly frustrated that Underwood was living on the streets in the New York, where Nickelodeon keeps its corporate headquarters.
The show is having “revamps and reunions and everything, and nobody’s speaking on Kianna Underwood.”
After Underwood’s death, Bates posted, “Y’all have no idea how much this one hurts…Sick to my stomach….So many people failed baby girl.”
Underwood was killed in a horrific hit-and-run in Brooklyn on Friday morning, struck two drivers — and the first one was driving on the wrong side of the street against traffic, police told the Daily News on Saturday.
Initially, cops were identifying only one car — described just as a black sedan — as being involved, saying it hit the 33-year-old former Nickelodeon star, then dragged her for two blocks until her body came loose from underneath it.
New information from police revealed Underwood was crossing the street in the crosswalk against a red light at the intersection of Pitkin Ave. and Mother Gaston Blvd. in Brownsville around 6:50 a.m. when she was first struck by the driver of a Black 2021 Ford Explorer SUV.
The SUV driver was heading west and had the light on Pitkin Ave. but veered across the double yellow line to pass another vehicle trying to make a right turn and hit Underwood, cops said.
The driver kept going, and moments later, a second driver in a black-and-gray sedan hit and dragged her body for more than two blocks. The sedan driver also fled the scene, police said. EMS pronounced Underwood dead at the scene.
No arrests have been made.
Underwood, who grew up in New York City, starred in films and TV shows in the late ’90s and early 2000s. She was only 6 when in 1999 she made her first film appearance in “The 24 Hour Woman.”
She was in the first national tour of “Hairspray” as little Inez and appeared in seven episodes of the Nickelodeon sketch comedy show “All That.”
Friends and neighbors recalled Underwood as a kind and talented young girl with a beautiful voice who had fallen on hard times after her years of childhood fame. People who knew her in Brownsville said she was homeless.
“She used to model for me when she was 5 and 6 years old. I had a modeling agency… She was beautiful and I just snapped her up,” said T.C. Jackson, a resident at the Lincoln Houses NYCHA complex in Harlem, where Underwood’s family previously lived for more than 25 years.
“After she did two fashion shows, she went on to television. She did TV commercials. She had real talent. She did Nickelodeon and then we didn’t see her after that.”