'Grey's Anatomy' Showrunner Talks Why [SPOILER] Was Killed Off

Krista Vernoff is opening up about the shocking mid-season premiere of Grey’s Anatomy.

If you haven’t seen the show yet, or read the what happened, DON’T READ AHEAD. There are major SPOILERS!

The longtime showrunner spoke to Entertainment Weekly about the how the story was born and how [SPOILER] reacted to it.

“It’s like a story that told itself to me at the very beginning,” Krista shared. “At the very beginning of this season as I took a walk on the beach and asked: ‘What are the stories? What are we doing?’”

She continued, “These episodes came in whole cloth. This is what I came into the writers’ room knowing. I didn’t like it and it made me mad and it made me cry even as I imagined it…I will admit that multiple times as we were writing the season and even as we were shooting these episodes, I came into the writers’ room shouting and crying like, ‘Really?! This is what we’re doing? I think I’m chickening out! I think we have to save him, you guys!’”

Click inside to see what Krista Vernoff shared about the decision to kill off [SPOILER] from “Grey’s Anatomy”…

Here’s the reason why DeLuca was killed off…

Krista adds that the decision to kill Andrew DeLuca, played by Giacomo Giannotti, came in a wave.

“There was no decision to kill the character and then discussion of how are we going to kill him. There literally was an entire imagining that came into my head of DeLuca following the sex trafficker out of the hospital, following her through the city, refusing to let up, and being punched in the stomach at a certain point by some colleague of hers who he didn’t see coming and him dropping,” she explained. “You think he was punched and then you realized he was stabbed and that moves into Grey’s Anatomy and he visits with Meredith on the beach.”

She added, “The whole thing downloaded and I was like, ‘Oh my God, we’re killing DeLuca?’ That’s how it happened. Nobody wanted to kill DeLuca. I didn’t want to kill DeLuca! But when I came in and said, ‘You guys, this is the story,’ everyone went, ‘Oh yeah, that’s the story.’”

“We wanted to honor the fact that we didn’t feel like we had completed the storytelling of the sex trafficking [plot] and this felt like the story,” Krista said.

See what fans are saying about the death of DeLuca here…