Summerkids Camp Operators Responsible for Fraudulent Lifeguard Certification
This is the initial lawsuit document, known as a Complaint, which Doug Forbes and Elena Matyas filed in November of 2019.
UPDATED: AUGUST 26, 2020 10:53PM
Doug Forbes and Elena Matyas established Meow Meow Foundation after their 6-year-old daughter Roxie suffered a horrific death at Summerkids camp located in Altadena, CA. Roxie drowned due to grossly negligent acts, including fraud, according to volumes of legal documents and admissions.
Summerkids representatives have since pressured the foundation to remove content about the circumstances of the drowning from this website, which violates First Amendment rights and which constitutes a despicable attempt to muzzle grieving parents who simply want answers.
The four family members who own and operate Summerkids immediately and without explanation removed Forbes and Matyas from the camp parent portal and all communications so that they could not seek answers. The camp owners also told major media and thousands of parents that Forbes and Matyas demanded their privacy, which was a lie. The camp operators also prevented Forbes and Matyas from attending a meeting where other parents wanted answers about Roxie’s death.
Nonetheless, the camp owners refused to refund the parent’s $3 thousand tuition until Forbes demanded the refund through an attorney. Roxie’s horrific death occured just 10 days into her 8-week camp schedule.
Sadly, the vast majority of California’s recreational camps operate without critical oversight. As a result of this colossal gap, children continue to suffer considerable injuries, sexual abuse, infections from COVID-19 and even death. Facing a range of lawsuits from the California Attorney General and other parties, Summerkids is a prime example of why the state and the nation must take further action to protect vulnerable children.
PASADENA, Calif. — According to admissions and legal documents, the Altadena recreational camp known as Summerkids apparently executed a longtime fraud scheme linked to the horrific death of 6-year-old Roxie Forbes last June.
Summerkids owner-operators hired a fake lifeguard instructor named Andrew Cervantes to certify counselors as lifeguards and water safety instructors, according to documents. The camp-director-owner happens to be a former Los Angeles Times reporter who has reported on egregious wrongdoing. Yet, she and Cervantes fraudulently certified counselors in lifeguarding, Water Safety Instruction (WSI), CPR, First Aid and AED (Automated External Defibrillator) in order to save money, according to volumes of documents and other evidence that Roxie’s father Doug Forbes accumulated in his investigation of the camp.
According to multiple employee statements and documents, the camp director and her family paid a fraction of recommended Red Cross program fees, which enabled them to pocket an extra roughly $5000. Red Cross lifeguard certification ordinarily costs $350 per person and WSI certification costs $335. The camp owners paid approximately $80 per person.
The camp director said in a media statement after Roxie’s horrific drowning and in subsequent statements, “4 certified lifeguards were at the pool.” That is a lie, because she did not reveal to the media and the authorities that those same counselors never received Red Cross requisite training or any testing. She also failed to reveal that she instructed Cervantes to ignore such requirements.
The resulting drowning occurred on Friday, June 28, 2019. The Los Angeles County Health Department only found out about Roxie’s death through multiple broadcast news reports. According to a series of county documents, health inspectors subsequently shut down the pool for nine violations.
The camp director sent a series of emails to parents in which she never disclosed how she was ultimately responsible for fraudulent lifeguard certifications and other Red Cross violations. She signed a government affidavit in which she lied about pool conditions because her own counselors contradicted her. She also installed a pool occupancy sign that violated local laws and attempted to cover up that act, according to evidence and legal filings.
The scope of the fraud scheme seemingly involves far more counselors than the four at the pool when Roxie drowned. As many as 100 fraudulent certifications are apparently involved.
The Summerkids Assistant Director quit her job after Roxie’s horrific death and another serious injury weeks later. She worked at Summerkids for a decade. She said she was re-certified in CPR, AED and first aid “the first day of camp” but her training and certifications are also under investigation.
She also said she did “a lot of medical…when we had medical situations, I’ve ridden to hospitals…” Yet, she has no formal medical training, She said, “In a situation [drowning] like this, I am fully trained and I responded.” She is not fully trained in drowning rescues and has never administered CPR.
The Assistant Director said, “I assessed the situation while I was doing CPR [on Roxie] and the counselors were doing what we trained them to do. I am incredibly proud of how they handled themselves.” She said this after her counselors had neglected Roxie to death and performed egregious CPR, according to medical records.
It is also unclear why she was assessing the scene while administering CPR and why she was administering CPR instead of the trained counselors of which she said she was “incredibly proud.” It also currently remains unclear how much she knew about the fraud scheme, however, she was deeply involved in almost every aspect of the camp operation.
The camp director-owner intentionally did not ride to the hospital with Roxie—nobody did. Instead, she holed up in her office as Roxie lay dead at the pool. And instead of immediately calling Forbes and Matyas, Roxie’s parents, she called her own parents. She intentionally avoided EMS responders and did not allow deputies to interview her as she remained in her office for upwards of 15 minutes. She never even helped her counselors assist with traumatized children.
She later entered the hospital trauma room without permission and was instructed to leave. Health administrators said she wanted them to know that Roxie had an immune deficiency as if to deflect from the fact that Roxie drowned under grossly negligent circumstances, according to volumes of reports.
Nonetheless, she and her camp-owning family continue to refer to a her counselors as appropriately certified American Red Cross lifeguards and water safety instructors. This is a lie based on Forbes’s intensive investigation replete with documents that prove the she and her fake lifeguard instructor fraudulently certified counselors as lifeguards for years.
The camp director-owner changed related copy on her website multiple times. The following is a screenshot of an older version of the site. Note the copy under Lifeguards and Ratios. According to the director-owner, 27 counselors are certified lifeguards and 9 are certified water safety instructors. Based on statements from multiple Summerkids employees and publicly available documents that Forbes uncovered, the camp-owning family is lying about their claims.
The following is the current Summerkids website copy that addresses certifications and policies. Note the changes under the Lifeguards heading.
One of these counselor’s is Roxie’s “buddy counselor.” His father is well known Los Angeles Times reporter Jim Rainey. This counselor was in the pool at the time of the drowning. Cervantes and Summerkids owners fraudulently certified this young man in lifeguarding/CPR/AED/first aid and WSI certifications only one week before Summerkids commenced its 2019 program.
He admitted that he and other counselors neglected Roxie until a counselor approximately 45-feet beyond the pool area screamed at them. None of the four or five counselors at the pool said they noticed Roxie “floating dead man” until the outside counselor screamed.
This counselor also said he flipped Roxie up straight and grabbed her under the arms before he placed her limp body on the pool deck. Not only do his actions defy proper rescue procedure, they can induce lethal consequences.
He admitted that he did not issue critical rescue breaths and his version of CPR included the repeated flipping of a dying Roxie onto her side to “let gravity take over.” Turning a victim to the side might be appropriate but not if he failed to support Roxie’s head or neck or properly sweep her mouth of vomit or clear her airway.
All of those actions can and likely did suffocate Roxie to death on the pool deck as she already was near cardiac arrest, according to medical documents. When EMS arrived, Roxie was, in fact, in full cardiac arrest. An EMS responder said he had never seen that amount of vomit in all of his drowning incidents, which indicates prolonged drowning time, according to an abundance of research.
Doctors pronounced Roxie dead one day later. That same day, her buddy counselor ran about Pasadena having his photo taken while publicly posting lighthearted messages with Instagram friends.
He also proudly, publicly posted a photo of himself and his friends urinating on a well-known Black-owned eatery in Silver Lake. This act in California can be punishable with jail time.
On his Twitter page, he posted a photo of his fake driver’s license (far right middle), and that of his girlfriend (bottom middle) and other friends as his masthead. Asked if he knew falsifying government documents could also result in imprisonment, he said “I have never been caught with a fake driver’s license.”
Not long after Roxie drowned, this counselor’s mother, Allison Bell Rainey, a public relations representative for the University of Southern California, repeatedly said to Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department homicide detectives that her son Hank was “also a victim” who “was unfortunately right there and had to save [Roxie].” She said, he was “totally blameless” and “wasn’t the one even watching,” because he was supposed to be “the fun one in the pool.” She laughed throughout her phone call with the detectives, despite the fact that a 6-year-old child suffered a horrific death having been neglected by her son and others who were fake lifeguards.
Properly trained and tested lifeguards are not supposed to be in the pool during their watch, unless charged with specific rescue or training duties. According to the lifeguard certification manuals, lifeguards promote water safety, prevent accidents and injury while also applying crucial response techniques in the event of a water emergency. Being “the fun one in the pool” is not listed anywhere in guidelines.
Excerpts from Allison Rainey’s publicly available conversation are here.
Another counselor who claims to have been watching children in the pool and who was fraudulently certified as a lifeguard, said she not only walked away from multiple children as young as four who were in the deep end while Roxie drowned, but she was playing with them by throwing diving sticks into eight feet of water.
She also said she held Roxie’s head forward in her lap during the failed CPR effort. Doing so further closes a drowning victim’s airway and suffocates their ability to breath.
After EMS rushed Roxie to the hospital, only the Assistant Director remained on site as the one full time staffer in charge of hundreds of children, many traumatized, and counselors, some of whom were also children. At least 30-40 of the children saw Roxie violently die in front of them and most witnessed the traumatic arrival of emergency services.
As Roxie’s parents Doug Forbes and Elena hovered over their dead child and as dozens if not hundreds of children were traumatized or shocked by the event, the camp director-owner sent Forbes and Matyas an email stating that she was distributing a PR message about the drowning. That message not only included a multitude of lies, according to evidence and legal documents, but it also said, “Please do not plan to pick up your child early…We have kept the day as normal as possible.”
This means that the camp director and her family were preventing parents from picking up their traumatized children.
The camp-owning family formerly had a website page dedicated to their pool, which was removed after Roxie drowned. The website said, “A lifeguard sits in the lifeguard chair at all times while children are in the pool.” This was another lie. The supervising counselor at the pool, who was also a fake lifeguard, removed himself from the chair before Roxie drowned. He also abandoned the scene after other first year and minor counselors extricated Roxie from the pool.
The Summerkids website also said, “Although we do not give lessons to Summerkids campers [ages 5+], our swim counselors work with children who are not water safe to make them water safe.” This was another lie. At no time did they attempt to make Roxie or her group of nonswimmers or learning swimmers water safe. In fact, they failed to keep them within an arm’s length, which is a Red Cross policy.
One of the Summerkids owners is an emergency room doctor in Long Beach. According to his former Summerkids website bio he “oversees health and safety, the Summer Challenge, and is a zany addition to campfire. Each summer, he rearranges his ER shifts so that he can be with us on a regular basis.” After Roxie drowned, his bio suddenly said he, “is a zany addition to campfire. He is the father of two school-age sons, both of whom are campers!”
The facts are that he was rarely ever at the camp and was in Hawaii when Roxie drowned. Forbes and Matyas decided to chose Summerkids because the camp-owning family pledged they had a doctor on site, certified Red Cross lifeguards at the pool and highly trained counselors, all of which were lies.