Trump Honors Teen Lifeguard at White House After Daring Santa Cruz Rescue
The 16-year-old California State Parks lifeguard who catapulted to national acclaim after his rescue of a boy from 8-to-10-foot waves at a beach in Santa Cruz sat in the Oval Office on Monday. The 10-year-old boy he saved sat a few feet away.
President Donald Trump had invited lifeguard Ryder Williams and beachgoer Nathaniel Rai after footage of the July 25 rescue at Seabright State Beach garnered millions of views on social media. Both families came, along with several State Parks officials, including Aaron Bohnen, the second State Parks lifeguard who joined the rescue.
“This is a great story,” Trump said. “I’ve never seen water that looks so calm, and then every 15 seconds, you know, the violence comes back in.”
Williams, who has declined interviews since the rescue, spoke publicly for the first time. Asked what went through his mind, he said lifeguards “always try to fall back on our training.” He said he wants to become a firefighter and go through paramedic school.
Fellow lifeguard Bohnen has already taken that path. He told Trump he works full time as a firefighter and paramedic for a California fire department and has stayed on the State Parks rolls anyway, helping train guards like Williams.
“I owe this program a lot,” Bohnen said.
Bohnen noted that many of the lifeguards working the beaches around Santa Cruz are 16 or 17.
Nathaniel’s father, Sumit Rai, said he was “beyond grateful” to Williams, Bohnen and the bystanders who tried to help, and that it was a privilege to sit beside his son a day before the boy’s birthday.
Justin McHenry, an aquatic superintendent with State Parks, told Trump the department trains about 200 lifeguards a year.
The work “requires a lot of integrity and resilience,” he said. In conditions like those at Seabright, he added, “losing a victim would be disastrous.”
Asked whether more of the California coast needs coverage, McHenry pointed to staffing considerations. In beach towns with million-dollar homes, McHenry noted that lifeguards make a “little more” than minimum wage. Told of a push in Congress to classify open-water lifeguards as first responders, Trump said he would “put my weight behind it.”
The conditions at Seabright State Beach were not unusual for late summer on the day 10-year-old Rai was swept out to sea, with swells generated by tropical cyclones thousands of miles away. What makes them particularly dangerous, officials told KQED, are the disarmingly long lulls between wave sets.
“The further the swell comes from, the farther away the waves have time to organize themselves,” David Bodine, marine safety captain for the Santa Cruz City Fire Department, told KQED last month. “And then they’re more powerful when they do hit.”
Forecasters had a beach hazards statement in effect for 33 days between June 1 and early August, about three times the average for that window since 2012.
“There certainly are unguarded areas within the state and around the nation, and people getting in without the knowledge or ability to recreate in those waters can be extremely dangerous,” McHenry told Trump.