Naya Rivera's ex-husband reveals heartbreaking last words she said to son before drowning in tragic accident
Naya Rivera died as a result of drowning in 2020
Callum Jones
Naya Rivera's ex-husband has revealed the heartbreaking last words she said to her son before she drowned in a tragic accident.
The Glee actor died in July 2020 after she drowned at Lake Piru, near Santa Clarita, California. She was on a boat with her four-year-old son before the incident.
An extensive search followed, and Rivera's body was recovered from the river some five days later.
A day afterwards, the Ventura County medical examiner released an autopsy report that stated the actor's cause of death was an accidental drowning.
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This was nearly five years ago, and Rivera's ex-husband, actor Ryan Dorsey, has been speaking about her legacy.
In an interview with People, Dorsey said the reminders of his former partner are everywhere.
"I’m here in L.A. working at Warner Bros., and Forest Lawn Cemetery [where she’s buried] is on the other side," he told the outlet.
"So many songs make me think about her, like Amy Winehouse's 'Valerie,' which she sang on Glee, and ‘Sunflower’ by [Post Malone and Swae Lee] because I always used to get her sunflowers on Sundays."
The actor continued: "I've never been one to talk about my life like this. I've turned down so many of these kind of things, because it was too hard.
"I still can't really look at pictures of her, and it's still hard to talk, but I feel like I'm ready. There's just so much that happened."
Josey, now nine, was on the boat and spent some time swimming when they noticed the boat had drifted, Dorsey said.
The mom told her son to swim back to the boat for safety, before he was able to pull himself 'around the boat', Dorsey added.
The actor continued: "He said that the last thing she said was his name, and then she went under, and he didn’t see her anymore. It just rocks my world that he had to witness her last moments."
Dorsey admitted that Josey still feels a lot of guilt towards his mother's death.
"Something he’s said over and over is that he was trying to find a life raft, and there was a rope, but there was a big spider on the rope, and he was too scared to throw it," he added.
"I keep reassuring him, ‘Buddy, that rope wasn’t going to be long enough.' That obviously still sticks out in his head because he feels like he could have saved her. I think she just got caught up in a brush — that or a weird undercurrent from the dam. It was just a freak occurrence."