Eyes roll to back of head on a ragdoll?

I added a prop_dynamic to my map with Barney.mdl and have a trigger that changes the animation of the character when the player passes through the trigger. I got everything to work just as I want with the trigger and everything but for some odd reason, Barney's eyes are completely white!? It's like his eyes rolled to the back of his head!

I tried adding an NPC_Barney instead, but found that without using choreography (which I haven't learned yet) I will not be able to change the animation. Currently I'm just using a simple input/output command. What WAS weird is that once I added the NPC_barney, the prop_dynamic barney didn't have the freakish white eyes anymore. This led me to believe that somehow the prop_dynamic didn't have any body to look at (and apparently a HL2DM player doesn't count) so his eyes rolled to the back of his head... once the npc_barney was there though, it somehow registered with him and his eyes were normal.

I tested several times and it truly was simply the edition of the npc that made the prop_dynamic's eyes work. Anyone have any clues on how to make this work w/o adding an extra NPC to my level? For now, that's what I've done, but there's got to be a better way... I don't want the extra model in the map for obvious performance reasons.

ahhh, ragdoll = dead, i would say, so its not a bug or anything.