Cardiac arrest just means your heart stopped beating, which is pretty much the textbook definition of death.
That’s basically like saying they’re dead because they died.
The interesting thing we want to know is what caused the cardiac arrest. Any time you see “cardiac arrest” in an article, it means that they either don’t know or don’t want to say the cause of death.
A heart attack can cause cardiac arrest, so could an overdose, or falling and hitting your head, or getting shot in the face.
That, or numerous other health problems, his body was pretty much wrecked from years of wrestling and such even without the steroids, he’s had drug and alcohol issues, and the dude was in his 70s, it’s not exactly unheard of for even relatively healthy people his age to just kind of keel over.
I don’t think there’s anything particularly interesting to his death, he was an unhealthy old guy, it’s not in the least bit surprising that he died. But “cardiac arrest” in articles is a personal pet peeve of mine. It says absolutely nothing about the cause of death, and people who don’t understand what it means tend to automatically think “oh, he had a heart attack” when that’s often not the case. It tells you basically nothing that a headline of something like “Joe Schmo, famous taxidermist, dead at 69” hasn’t already told you, and can be kind of misleading.
I work in 911 dispatch, the codes and policies and such used by different agencies will vary from one agency to another, I’ve entered calls for a “cardiac arrest” for countless different causes