3-year-old son of rodeo star dies after river accident

The three-year-old son of rodeo star Spencer Wright and his mother Kallie Wright, who was hospitalized in critical condition after his toy tractor landed in a Utah river nearly two weeks ago, has died.

According to Mindy Sue Clark, a family friend, Levi Wright drowned on May 21 and his brain was deprived of oxygen.

He was then taken to Beaver Valley Hospital and later flown by helicopter to Primary Children’s Hospital, where he remained in critical condition, as previously reported.

He died on June 2 after life support was taken off, Clark told People.

“Levi was the absolute best little boy. It’s going to be hard to get through life without him,” Clark said.

In a separate social media post on June 3, Clark recalled the rollercoaster of emotions she experienced as a result of the accident.

“I can’t even begin to describe how hard the last two weeks have been. From the moment my phone rang the night of his accident to last night when I got the news that he had to go,” she wrote.

“I don’t want to focus on the bad or sad, even though it feels like someone ripped out my heart and crushed it in front of my eyes. I want to focus on the many miracles that we all experienced during those 12 days. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people surrounded our best little buddy, prayed for him and hugged Levi and his family lovingly.”

Clark, Kallie Wright’s best friend, described Levi as “the most perfect three-year-old ever.”

“He has brought so many people together. In such a dark world, we have seen light through the hands of a child. He is everything his mom and dad could have wanted him to be,” she added in the post. “I am so thankful for all the time I got to be his ‘Aunt Mindy.’ It is a blessing I can never top. I am also so thankful that on my last visit to Utah, even though I was so tired, I stayed up a little later to make s’mores with the kids. It was the only thing they had talked about all day that day.”

Kallie Wright wrote in a Facebook post update on Sunday, June 2, that her family had to “face their greatest fear.”

“After several sleepless nights, much research, numerous conversations with the best neurologists in the world and millions of prayers, here we stand in the face of our greatest fear,” she wrote.

“Levi showed us just enough to give us time to do all of this,” she continued. “We prayed that he was defying the odds and proving to us that he wanted to stay, but now we see that he wanted to give us time to come to terms with letting him go. I told you my baby was attentive and considerate, and I truly believe he did that for us.”

“In that time, he expressed humanity across the country,” she added. “He brought so many to their knees and reminded them what really matters in this world. That gives the strength of the T-Rex a whole new meaning, doesn’t it?”

“We’ll miss him every second of every day down here, but we’re convinced this is the best thing we can do for him!” she added. “We love you, baby beans, and I can’t wait for the day when you can ‘work the soil’ with me again!”

As previously reported, the incident occurred as Kallie Wright was watching her son play on his tractor outside the family home. Wright briefly went inside to check on her 9-month-old baby. Within seconds, the 3-year-old ended up in a river at the edge of the property, which he normally stays away from.

“She saw his tractor overturn, immediately called 911, jumped into the water and started looking for him,” Clark told KSLTV at the time.

A few days later, the prognosis for the three-year-old was not good and Clark wrote that “his sweet little brain had been without oxygen for too long” and that the family “had a strong feeling that his spirit was no longer with us.”

Last week, he began showing signs of brain function when he briefly opened his eyes and responded to his sister’s voice in an EEG, according to previous Facebook posts.

The family had high hopes that, depending on further results, they would be able to wean the boy off his breathing tube.

But Kallie Wright revealed in her June 2 post that she will soon “climb into bed with (her) baby and hold him as he falls asleep for the last time on earth,” sharing that it gives her “comfort in knowing that he will go back to being the perfect little boy he was.”