“I kept telling her, ‘Don’t get out of the boat!”
Naya Rivera’s father opened up about the day his daughter died, revealing he spoke with her in a chilling phone call hours before she drowned.
During an interview with People, George Rivera recalled Naya FaceTiming him on July 8, 2020 from the pontoon boat she rented at a lake outside Los Angeles. The “Glee” vet was on the day trip with her young son, Josey, and called George for some fatherly advice.
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“She would always bounce stuff off me,” he explained to the outlet. “And she wanted to go swimming with Josey out in the middle of the lake.”
An avid boater, George said he became concerned when Naya said the pontoon did not have an anchor.
“I could see that the wind was blowing and my stomach was just cringing,” he explained. “I kept telling her, ‘Don’t get out of the boat! Don’t get out of the boat! It will drift away when you’re in the water.'”
The phone call lost connection after about three minutes, which George called “heartbreaking.”
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“I had this bad feeling that was just killing me,” he added.
Hours later the pontoon was found with Josey sleeping on the deck and Naya missing. After a five-day search, the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department discovered Naya’s body in a different section of the lake. According to authorities, after Naya and Josey went for a swim in the lake, she struggled to get him back on the boat and eventually drowned.
“It’s still pretty much a big blur of pain almost a year later,” George explained. “Things are slowly coming a little more into focus, but I don’t know if I’ll ever find closure from this. I miss her every day.”
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