Malcolm-Jamal Warner’s 8-Year-Old Daughter Was Swimming with Him Before His Drowning

In the new report obtained by the publication, police said surfers spotted the former child star and his daughter struggling and dove in to help.

One surfer reportedly used his board to bring Warner’s daughter to safety and a volunteer lifeguard pulled Warner and another surfer to shore, where Warner was given 45 minutes of CPR, according to police.

The 54-year-old actor, who was best known for his role as Theo Huxtable in The Cosby Show, died on Sunday, July 20, while on a family vacation with his wife and daughter, whose names have not been revealed to the public. He died near Cocles, a beach in Limon, Costa Rica, after getting caught by a rip current.

Both surfers survived.

Warner’s Not All Hood podcast cohost, Candace Kelley, revealed she spoke to him shortly before his sudden death.

“I spoke to him on Friday before he left,” Kelley told Us Weekly on Wednesday, July 23. “He wrote me this long, five-paragraph email from the plane, which is so strange. I’m like, ‘[You’re going to] Costa Rica.’ But, now that I’m going back to reading it, I’m very glad he did.”

According to Kelley, the last email she received from the actor was focused on growing their podcast and the “impact on people.”

“He had a serious commitment to his community and to his family and to his own personal legacy of what was right from wrong to make sure that the tropes of Black people that have been out there that he used his power to stamp them out,” Kelley added. “So, this email was just talking about, ‘All right, let’s, kind of, regroup. Let’s do it. Let’s go after this, and shift some of the dynamics,'” she said before adding, “We had a lot planned.”