Naya Rivera: Glee star missing after son found alone in boat at California lake
The former Glee actor Naya Rivera is missing and feared to have drowned at a lake in southern California.
A search operation at Lake Piru was suspended on Wednesday evening and was due to resume on Thursday.
The local TV station KNBC reported that the 33-year-old actor had rented a pontoon boat at the lake, and that her four-year-old son, Josey, was found on the boat wearing a lifejacket.
Josey is said to have told investigators that his mother was swimming and could not make it back to the boat. Rivera’s identification was found on the boat.
At a press conference, Eric Buschow, a spokesman for the Ventura County sheriff’s department, said there was “no evidence of foul play at this point” and “this may well be a case of drowning”.
Rivera’s breakthrough role was as Santana Lopez, a cheerleader, in Ryan Murphy’s musical comedy Glee, which aired from 2009 until 2015.
She was nominated for a Grammy along with her co-stars for the cast’s version of Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’. Rivera appeared in 113 episodes of the series and dated her co-star Mark Salling, who killed himself in 2018 after pleading guilty to child pornography charges. Another co-star, Cory Monteith, died in 2013 of a heroin and alcohol overdose.
Prior to the Glee role, Rivera was a child actor on shows including the CBS sitcom The Royal Family, which she joined at the age of four. In 2014 Rivera married the actor Ryan Dorsey, with whom she had her son. They divorced in 2018.