Julian Ryan died on July 4 after punching out a window and cutting his arm in order to save his family from the Texas floodwater that engulfed his home.

He looked at me and the kids and my mother-in-law and said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m not going to make it. I love you all,” Julian Ryan’s fiancée, Christinia Wilson, recalled.

Julian Ryan’s final words to his mother, as floodwaters quickly engulfed their trailer home, were simply, “I love you.”