Seventeen-year-old Bryant Wulu never had to be told what to do, his mother says. He’d just do it.
A rising senior at Sam Barlow High School in Gresham, Wulu would clean his family’s house early in the morning after staying up late playing video games. The rest of the family would awaken to a magically spotless, vacuumed house.
Wulu’s thoughtfulness is one of the things that Freta Freeman said she loved about her son, who died early Wednesday at Legacy Emanuel Medical Center in Portland. He had been fighting for his life since his rescue seven days earlier when he went under the water on the Sandy River.
Freeman, 44, can still picture Wulu in the kitchen making breakfast, with his younger foster siblings running around happily. He would cook for the family without anyone asking him to, she said.
“The sun shines when he walks into a room,” Freeman said. “Everybody falls in love.”
On July 24, Wulu told his family he was going to the movies, said his father George Pawoh.
Pawoh, 42, would later find out his son — who didn’t know how to swim — had gone to the river with a group of friends.
Around 11:45 a.m., multiple people called 911 to report a possible drowning at Dodge Park on the Sandy River, according to the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office. They said a teenage boy had gone underwater and hadn’t come up.
When rescuers arrived, they rushed into the water to search for Wulu, the sheriff’s office reported. At the same time, a helicopter pilot in the area spotted Wulu and told rescuers exactly where they needed to go.
They pulled Wulu from the water and took him to the hospital, the sheriff’s office reported. Sheriff’s officials didn’t name Wulu but friends and family identified him.
The hospital called Pawoh to tell him what had happened. By that time, his friendly, intelligent boy was lying in a hospital bed, Pawoh said.
“At that moment, it was too hard for me,” Pawoh said. “It was too hard for me to take.”
After being on a ventilator for a week, Wulu died surrounded by family. He had an older brother, two younger siblings and three foster siblings, Freeman said.
Freeman came to Oregon in 2004 as a refugee from Liberia. Wulu was born a few years later at Providence Milwaukie Hospital, she said.
Raised in Portland and Gresham, Wulu was a track and field athlete and took college-level courses at school. He was well known for cracking hilarious jokes, Freeman recalled.
Tim Barron, whose 17-year-old son Brayden was close friends with Wulu, remembered how Wulu brought out his son’s genuine belly laugh. The two boys always seemed so happy together.
“He was a joy to be around,” Barron said.
A group of Wulu’s friends met up on the evening of his death at their high school to talk and process their loss.
Since then, the Barlow community has been organizing ways to help Wulu’s family, including by setting up a GoFundMe.
During the last days of Wulu’s life, numerous friends and parents came to visit Freeman in the hospital. She took it as a testament to how many people the positive, humorous teenager touched.
“He’s a very sweet and friendly person,” she said. “He can be friends with anybody.”
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