Unbreakable bond. Glee alum Naya Rivera and her son, Josey Hollis Dorsey, had the sweetest love for one another.
The actress, 33, tied the knot with Josey’s father, actor Ryan Dorsey, in July 2014 during a secret and intimate ceremony in Mexico. Their union came just three months after Rivera split from ex-fiancé Big Sean.
Less than a year after their nuptials, the Santa Clarita native announced she and her then-husband were expecting their first child in February 2015. “Surprise! We’re having a baby! Ryan and I feel so blessed and can’t wait to welcome the newest member of our family,” Rivera captioned the graphic of a literal “bun in the oven” on Instagram.
Their little boy was born on September 17, 2015, at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles — and the singer’s maternal instincts blossomed.
“Naya was born to be a mother and is doing really great so far,” an insider told Us Weekly following the bundle of joy’s arrival in 2015. “Ryan has amazing paternal instincts and has been waiting on them both hand and foot. They are so excited to be first-time parents.” Rivera and Dorsey split in June 2018 and negotiated joint custody of Josey.
In July 2020, the model was declared a missing person after she and her 4-year-old rented a pontoon boat at Lake Piru near Los Angeles around 1 p.m. A few hours after the pair went out on the lake, the young boy was found sleeping alone on the boat and park rangers were notified to conduct a search.
According to the sheriff’s department’s spokesman, Capt. Eric Buschow, divers searched the lake and helicopters scanned the surrounding areas but the search was called off by 10 p.m. due to visibility.
On July 13, Rivera was confirmed dead after her body resurfaced at Lake Piru. Authorities are waiting on an autopsy to determine her cause of death, but they theorize she died saving her son. “There are a lot of currents on the lake that appear, particularly in the afternoon,” Ventura County Sheriff Bill Ayub explained during a press conference. “We believe it was mid-afternoon when she disappeared, the idea perhaps being that the boat started drifting, it was unanchored and that she mustered enough energy to get her son back onto the boat, but not enough to save herself.”
Rivera’s love for her son was clear even in her final moments, and it was mirrored in her last social media posts on Instagram and Twitter. Just one day before her death, she shared a precious photo of herself and her son snuggled up. “Just the two of us,” she captioned the Instagram pic. Scroll through the gallery to see all of Rivera’s sweetest moments with her son, Josey.