By MATTHEW WRIGHT and TIM STICKINGS FOR DAILYMAIL.COM
The search for Glee actress Naya Rivera resumed on Thursday morning, a day after she went missing on a California lake during a day on the water with her four-year-old son.
The Glee star and her son Josey rented a pontoon boat on Lake Piru, which is 60 miles from Rivera’s Los Angeles home and around 20 miles from where she grew up in Valencia, on Wednesday afternoon. They were alone and their car was parked nearby.
Three hours after they took the boat out, another boater saw their pontoon drifting. When they approached it, they found Josey on board, asleep, but there was no sign of Rivera.
Josey was wearing his life-vest but an adult life-vest was found on the boat, suggesting Rivera was not wearing hers.
The boy later told investigators that he climbed back on the boat and his mother did not, but the circumstances are unclear and cops say it is ‘challenging’ to interrogate a toddler. According to TMZ, the boy says his mother ‘jumped in the water and didn’t come back up’.
Rivera had shared a poignant picture of herself and Josey just a day before her disappearance, with the caption ‘Just the two of us’, in a post which has since attracted an outpouring of sympathy and prayers.
In recent weeks, her social media has been full of posts of the pair at home. Last week, she shared a cryptic selfie about appreciating life, writing: ‘no matter the year, circumstance, or strifes everyday you’re alive is a blessing. make the most of today and every day you are given. tomorrow is not promised.’
Divers and helicopters were scouring the reservoir until darkness fell but no trace of Rivera has been found.
On Thursday morning, they returned to the lake at daybreak. It is closed to the public while the search for her continues. The divers focused their search to the lake’s rocky shores.
At least eight other people have drowned in the lake since 1994, including a father who died in 2008 after saving his daughter who’d fallen in to the water. He was able to get her back onto their boat before it drifted away and he died.
Actress Naya Rivera is presumed dead after her four-year-old son, Josey Hollis, was found alone in a boat on Lake Piru in California on Wednesday afternoon, a day after posting a tragic final Instagram (right) with her son which she captioned ‘just the two of us’
Demi Lovato was among the celebrities to hold out hope last night, asking her 87million Instagram followers to ‘pray for Naya Rivera to be found safe and sound’.
Rivera’s former Glee co-star Heather Morris said: ‘We need all the prayers we can get to bring our Naya back to us… we need your love and light.’
Glee cast member Harry Shum Jr, who played Mike Chang, simply wrote ‘Praying’, while Iqbal Theba (Principal Figgins) and Max Adler (David Karofsky) have also posted concerned messages on social media.
Rivera’s ex-fiancee Big Sean signalled his concern this morning by liking a series of tweets praying for her safety and demanding that the search for her should continue.
Zack Teperman, a publicist who said Rivera was ‘one of the first people I had the honor of working with’, said he was ‘in complete disbelief and shock right now’.
‘Was just messaging Naya a few weeks back. This can’t be true. Prayers for her little boy,’ he said last night.
Officials told NBC Los Angeles that Rivera’s disappearance was ‘considered to be a horrible accident’, saying there was no suspicion of foul play.
Authorities believe Rivera to be ‘presumed drowned,’ according to Captain Eric Buschow, a spokesman for the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office. He told the Ventura County Star that authorities were searching for a body.
Reports say that some of Rivera’s possessions including a purse, wallet and food were found on the boat. Another purse is said to have been left in Rivera’s car, a Mercedes G-Wagon which was still in the parking lot.
A search and rescue dive team and a helicopter with a drone were both dispatched to the lake, around 60 miles north-west of downtown Los Angeles.
The search was suspended overnight but is due to continue ‘at first light’, authorities said last night.
Eric Buschow, a spokesman for the sheriff’s office, told reporters after darkness fell that Rivera and her son were seen going out on the lake at around 1pm.
‘Approximately three hours after they left the dock another boater out on the lake discovered the boat drifting with the [son]on board asleep,’ they said.
‘So they contacted the rangers and began an investigation and we’ve been actively searching for the mother since that time. We have both aerial search going on and our dive team as well.
‘Indications are that we believe she did go in the lake. At this point it’s still a search and that’s what we know up to this point.
‘The [son]said that he had been swimming with his mother and that she got back in the boat and her mum didn’t. ‘We know that the [boy]had a life vest on, there was another adult life vest found on the boat.
‘You can imagine it’s somewhat challenging interviewing a three-year-old and getting those kinds of details.
‘We’re going on the belief that she did go in the water, and we’ve not been able to locate her. This may well be a case of drowning.’
Buschow said it was not known how deep the water was at the spot where Rivera went into the water or what kind of conditions they might have been facing.
‘This is a big reservoir, it’s deep, these kinds of things happen. We don’t know all the circumstances. Investigators are working on that, getting as much information as possible,’ he said.
The sheriff’s office initially referred mistakenly to a three-year-old girl, but later clarified that the child is a four-year-old son.
Investigators have made contact with Rivera’s family and said they were working to ‘reunite’ the toddler with relatives, which they have now done.
It is not clear whether Rivera had driven from her LA home or was staying somewhere closer to the lake.
Rivera had last posted on social media on July 7, sharing a touching photo of her with her so Josey. ‘Just the two of us,’ she wrote as a caption.
The actress starred in Glee from 2009 to 2015, playing high school cheerleader Santana Lopez for all six seasons of the popular series.
Naya welcomed son, Josey Hollis, with then-husband Ryan Dorsey in 2015. She called her young son ‘my greatest success, and I will never do any better than him’ in her 2016 memoir ‘Sorry Not Sorry.’
Rivera and Hollis divorced in 2018, after Rivera had earlier applied to end the marriage in 2016 but the couple had initially reconciled.
On Thanksgiving weekend 2017, Rivera was arrested in West Virginia on suspicion of domestic battery against Dorsey. The Kanawha County Sheriff’s Office said Dorsey later asked that Rivera not be prosecuted.
Dorsey, also an actor, has appeared on shows including Ray Donavan and Justified.
Former Glee co-star Matthew Morrison defended Rivera at the time of her arrest, saying she was a ‘great mom’.
Before that, Rivera was engaged to rapper Big Sean but they broke off their marriage plans in 2014. Big Sean featured on Rivera’s debut single ‘Sorry’, which was released in September 2013.
Rivera also dated co-star Mark Salling, who killed himself in 2018 after pleading guilty to child pornography charges.
In her memoir, the actress admitted that she was not surprised by his criminal record.
She wrote: ‘I can’t say I was totally shocked. When Mark dumped me, I thought it was the worst thing ever, but can you imagine if that didn’t happen?… and I was laying there in bed when the battering ram came through the door?’.
The Glee cast had already been hit by tragedy in 2013, when Cory Monteith was found dead in a Canadian hotel room. A coroner’s report blamed the 31-year-old’s death on a fatal dose of heroin and alcohol.
Rivera later described Monteith’s death as one of her toughest personal moments, saying in a 2016 interview that ‘the Cory chapter really choked me up’ when she was writing her memoir.
Born in 1987, Rivera began her acting career at just months old, starring as a baby in adverts for Kmart before landing a significant role as Hillary Winston on the CBS sitcom The Royal Family at the age of four.
After years spent playing guest roles and reoccurring TV parts Rivera secured her breakthrough role in Glee at the age of 22. The role earned her award nominations for numerous accolades.
During this time, in 2011, she signed to Columbia Records and launched a solo singing career, releasing a single with rapper Big Sean in 2013 – who she was then dating – titled Sorry.
Rivera made her first film debut as Vera in the horror film At the Devil’s Door in 2014, then returned to TV to play the reoccurring role of Blanca on Devious Maids in 2015.
Lake Piru is a reservoir located in the Los Padres National Forest and Topatopa Mountains, created in 1955.
