Cast of Glee gather at California lake where Naya Rivera vanished as police recover a body

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Police say it appears Naya Rivera ‘mustered enough energy to get her son back on the boat, but not enough to save herself’, after confirming the body of the Glee star was found in Lake Piru Monday.   

Rivera went missing on Wednesday afternoon during a boat day with her four-year-old son Josey. He was found asleep in his life jacket on their pontoon but there was no trace of the 33-year-old. 

Ventura County Sheriff Bill Ayub said at a news conference Monday afternoon: ‘She must have mustered enough energy to get her son back on the boat, but not enough to save herself.’

She and her son had climbed off the boat and gone swimming. The boy told investigators that his mother helped him back aboard but when he looked back he saw her disappear into the water, Ayub said. 

Earlier on Monday, the Ventura County Sheriff announced that a body had been pulled from the water. 

Ayub said that while an autopsy and official identification are forthcoming, the circumstances from the location of the body to the fact that no one else has been reported missing in the lake makes the department ‘confident that the body we found is Naya Rivera.’ 

He said there was no indication of foul play and no indication this was a suicide. Ayub confirmed an adult life jacket was on board the boat and that the body recovered was not in a life jacket. He did not have details on if Rivera was able to swim. 

Ayub said swimming is allowed in the lake but that it is typically used for watercraft recreation. A petition was started Monday to ban swimming ‘in these dangerous waters’. 

Captain Eric Buschow confirmed on Monday afternoon that it was Rivera’s body and that the family had been informed.  ‘This hits home for everybody involved. We’re in the business of saving people… it’s hard for everybody involved,’ he said. 

He added that he hoped the discovery would bring some closure to her family. 

‘Finding out she’s missing and then this day to day, the wait and not knowing… hopefully this provides some level of closure,’ he said.  

The actress’s family rushed to the lake on Monday morning and some of her Glee castmates, including Heather Morris, were also there. 

They held hands on the shore while waiting for more information from the star’s family and from the authorities.  Rivera was found on the seventh anniversary of Naya’s former co-star Cory Monteith’s death.  

A Ventura police officer told DailyMail.com it was ‘gut-wrenching’ and ‘devastating’ to see the family’s grief.  

The family were pictured on Saturday stricken with grief, running fully clothed into the lake and splashing the water on their faces, as search and rescue teams armed with sonar equipment and sniffer dogs scoured its murky bed.

Last week one of the dive team explained to DailyMail.com that gases released from a corpse decomposing underwater would cause it to rise up to the surface, usually after four to seven days unless it was caught on branches or tangled in vegetation underwater.

Police said the county’s medical examiner has been called, and will take the body back to their office to be officially identified and to perform an autopsy. 

On Monday, they honed in on a cove where the actress had taken a photograph of Josey and sent it to a relative 90 minutes before he was found on the boat. 

They focused their search on that cove on Monday. 

The actress grew up 20 miles from the lake and was familiar with it, police sources said last week. 

She thought of it as her ‘sanctuary’, despite it being known for rip currents and icy waters that can overpower swimmers.   

On Sunday, Naya’s distraught family were seen at the lake trying to assist investigators in their search for her.  

‘There was a picture sent to a family member that showed the boy on the boat by a cove. We found where that cove was,’ Robert Inglis of the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office Search & Rescue Team told Us Weekly. 

He previously said: ‘What I suspect is that the winds kicked up. 

‘Those pontoon boats are very light, and when you push them, it can get away from you. She might’ve tried to swim after the boat. But that’s all speculation. Once we do locate her, that’ll answer a lot more questions.’ 

Police have not shared the image and it’s unclear which cove it was taken in. Over the weekend, they asked members of the public not to go looking for the star themselves in the dangerous water.   

The actress’s father George on Sunday appeared to help co-ordinate the hunt for his missing daughter after police confirmed ‘nothing came’ of their search of cabins along Lake Piru.  

On Sunday, the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office had announced that cabins on the banks of the lake would be searched after social media users theorized that Rivera could have ended up in one.

But Sgt. Shannon King later told People: ‘They’re not occupied. Nothing came of it. There’s no evidence to say she left the water. It appears to be 100 percent just a tragic drowning.’ 

The lake itself is 1,200 acres and can reach depths of up to 130 feet. 

In it, authorities point to a barely visible tree limb highlighting the challenges divers were facing in trying to find the mother-of-one. 

With almost zero visibility, human divers were resorting to searching by feel, Eric Buschow, Ventura County Sheriff’s Office spokesman, said at a press conference Friday evening.

‘We don’t know if she’s going to be found five minutes from now or five days from now, so we’re still going to be continuing this effort,’ he said. 

‘The visibility in the water is one to two feet,’ Buschow added.   

‘Rest sweet, Naya. What a force you were,’ wrote ‘Glee’ co-star Jane Lynch on Twitter. Steven Canals, who co-created and produced the FX television show ‘Pose,’ tweeted that he was ‘heartbroken over all the stories that will remain untold.’   

‘Naya Rivera was a fierce talent with so much more to do and this is such a terrible tragedy. We are forever grateful for the indelible contribution she made to `Glee,´ from the first episode to the last,’ said a statement from 20th Century Fox TV and Fox Entertainment.

Rivera´s death is the latest death in a tragic arc of ‘Glee’ actors. 

Monteith died in 2013 – exactly seven years to the day before Rivera’s body was identified – from a toxic mix of alcohol and heroin.

Rivera´s ex-boyfriend Mark Salling, who played a jock on the series, killed himself in 2018 after pleading guilty to child pornography charges. Rivera and Salling dated for three years and broke up in 2010.

In the preface to her autobiography, Rivera wrote that motherhood had changed her life and given it perspective. She said she was braver, too.

‘Your life doesn’t have to be perfect for you to be proud. In fact, I think it´s the opposite: the more imperfect your life has been, the prouder you should be, because it means you’bv come that much further, and also probably had a lot more fun along the way.’