Ryder Williams, 16, is scheduled to meet President Trump in the Oval Office on Monday.
The rookie lifeguard from Santa Cruz, California, will sit down with the president at 1 p.m. ET, accompanied by his family and potentially the 10-year-old boy he pulled from deadly surf. Williams earned the invitation after a harrowing July 25 rescue at Seabright State Beach went viral, drawing praise from Eric Trump before capturing the president’s attention.
“We’re going to bring this heroic young man, and his family, into the White House with, perhaps, the boy he saved, to give him a High Civilian Honor. Very brave, he deserves it!,” Trump posted on social media days after the rescue.
Williams, in his first season with California State Parks, has downplayed the heroics despite the national spotlight. In a video interview posted to the agency’s Instagram account on August 1, he walked through the terrifying moments when Nathaniel Rai’s life hung in the balance.
“As I grab the child, he goes limp, so I’m thinking about if he’s unconscious or not, that I really need to go in,” Williams said.
The teen had spotted Nathaniel lose his footing in ankle-deep water before a sneaker wave dragged the boy into 8-to-10-foot surf. Williams radioed for help, ditched his radio and sunglasses at his tower base, and sprinted into the churning water with fins on his wrist and his rescue buoy deployed.
“The challenges for this rescue was that it was so close in, fins were ineffective,” Williams said in his statement.
The closer he got, the more desperate the situation became. Nathaniel had gone limp, and the waves kept pounding both of them.
“I was unable to pull him out because he was limp and the waves were pushing so hard,” Williams said.
He held his ground alone, waiting for backup he knew he would need.
“The whole time I was thinking, I just need to hold my position until my partner can get here because I’m not going to be able to get him out on my own,” he said.
Beachgoers rushed toward the water to help, but Williams waved them back to shore, knowing untrained rescuers would only add to the danger.
“There were bystanders who jumped in to try to help, and I yelled at them all to get back to shore,” he said.
Fellow lifeguard Aaron Bohnen eventually reached the pair and took over holding the exhausted child.
“My partner mostly takes over holding the child because at this point, my arms were very exhausted from holding on,” Williams recalled. “I still support him as much as I can as we drag him out of the water.”
Nathaniel’s father, Sumit Rai, was at his Dallas home when he got the call that night. He has since credited Williams’ split-second decision with saving his son’s life.
“Gratefully, he’s alive. It’s a miracle,” Rai told The California Post. “I’m so grateful to that lifeguard, Ryder.”
“Two more seconds he gets thrown another 15-20 feet,” Rai added. “You can’t see him, let alone rescue him.”
After reaching shore, Nathaniel coughed up sand and remained in shock. His father described the boy as subdued and traumatized.
“My son told me that he drowned and my son told me that he went unconscious,” Rai said. “He was very subdued, still in a state of shock.”
For Williams, though, the dramatic rescue was simply part of the job.
“That is just a part of our daily task to do. We can keep the public safe. That’s the reason we were on the beach,” he said.
Rather than calling it a day after the high-stakes rescue, Williams climbed back into his tower.
“I returned to my tower after the rescue and continued to make safety contacts and ended up making more rescues later that day,” he said.
Williams also emphasized that saving lives is a team effort.
“Together that day, we had many units on and all the tower staff. All the towers are making constant safety contacts with the units driving through to support us. Without working together, we would not be able to make many of the rescues we do,” he said.
In the viral moment that started it all, bystander Scott Vander Dussen captured approximately two minutes of footage showing Williams grabbing Nathaniel as wave after wave crashed over them, the pair disappearing and reemerging as the surf receded. The video spread rapidly across social platforms, eventually reaching Eric Trump and then the president himself. California State Parks reported 34 rescues that weekend across Santa Cruz County as dangerous rip currents and large swells pounded the coast.
Williams’ lifeguard supervisor, Byran Kine, has praised the teen’s composure under pressure.
“He’s definitely a special individual. And we are really proud to have him on the team and definitely stoked on the actions that he took and that we were able to bring everybody home safely that night,” Kine said.
U.S. Rep. Jimmy Panetta, who represents Santa Cruz, has also commended Williams and his fellow lifeguards.
“We are very proud of this young man and his first rescue, and are grateful that his inspiring actions were caught on video so that the world gets to see what our amazing local lifeguards do on a daily basis in Santa Cruz,” Panetta said.
Williams’ father, Shane Williams, a retired firefighter, said he nearly broke down when his son recounted the rescue.
“He told me: ‘I just was not going to let that happen,'” Shane Williams said during a telephone interview. “I almost started crying because how determined he was to save that boy’s life makes me so proud.”
The elder Williams added that his son remains baffled by the scale of attention, believing any other lifeguard would have done the same.
The White House meeting caps a whirlwind two weeks for the teenager, who has gone from anonymous rookie to national figure while maintaining the same shift schedule he kept before the rescue made him famous.