LAWSUIT SETTLES, SHOCKING REVELATIONS WITH NATIONAL IMPLICATIONS
This is the Fourth Amended Complaint for this lawsuit which is a public document that describes the claims against the defendants.
LOS ANGELES – Meow Meow Foundation owner Doug Forbes recently settled a lawsuit he filed in 2019 against owner-operators of the Altadena children’s camp known as Summerkids, and while the terms of the agreement will remain confidential, Forbes said the reasons for his prolonged pursuit of justice will not.
Forbes and his wife Elena Matyas, who died in 2022, filed their wrongful death lawsuit after their six-and-a-half-year-old daughter Roxie drowned under grossly negligent circumstances at Summerkids camp, according to court documents and admissions. The camp is owned and operated by an Altadena family consisting of a mother and father who are former city college teachers, their daughter who is a former Los Angeles Times reporter and their son who is an emergency room doctor.
“I can’t divulge what we discussed during settlement negotiations, but I can tell you that I was not surprised that the trial ended as abruptly as it did,” Forbes said. “After putting the camp family, their camp counselors and our experts on the witness stand, it was clear to me that their admissions and our exhibits supported every assertion I have made for years.”
Forbes and the camp family entered settlement negotiations after only six days of federal trial in the United States District Court, Central District of California. According to publicly available documents, the parties had unsuccessfully attempted similar negotiations on more than eight occasions spanning more than six years.
Forbes said the camp family requested settlement talks on the eve before the Court was scheduled to play two hours of video deposition testimony of his deceased wife after which Forbes himself was scheduled to testify. Forbes said that their back-to-back proclamations promised to afford the most deeply moving and shocking revelations to date.
Forbes leaned on his own investigative journalism experience to unearth a multitude of documents and admissions which led the couple to allege that Roxie’s drowning death was a direct result of the camp-operating family having committed grossly negligent acts, including fraud, according to legal filings.
Forbes said that his wife’s dying words, which he recorded, were to get as much justice for Roxie as possible. “I like to think I lived up to that promise,” he said. Forbes leveraged his investigative experience to illustrate deep concerns about thousands of U.S. summer camps like Summerkids that are not bound by licensing or oversight requirements.
Summer camp drowning has been a perennial but largely unknown issue. Forbes said he will use his trial transcripts to show how the camp operator family took advantage of the fact that they could run an unlicensed, unregulated, dubiously managed camp whose owners prioritized profit over proper child protections, according to hundreds of detailed court filings.
According to YouGov and other research, swimming is the most popular activity at summer camps. In fact, recreational aquatics programs serve as a primary camp recruitment tool.
The Summerkids camp director said that her family had enrolled roughly 10,000 children since the camp’s inception. Some children were as young as three.
From 2006-2014, the camp family knowingly hired a former lifeguard instructor who provided some guidance to Summerkids counselors but had no intention of legitimately training and certifying them as lifeguards. Therefore, the daughter and her father intentionally chose to not legitimately train and certify their counselors as lifeguards, despite telling parents that they did, according to archives of web pages and other documents that Forbes exhibited at trial.
After 2014, the camp operating family hired a different person named Andrew Cervantes to provide lifeguard instruction. It took only days for Forbes to discover Cervantes had fraudulently certified himself as a Red Cross lifeguard and instructor. He subsequently fraudulently certified more than 100 Summerkids counselors as lifeguards and water safety instructors.
According to American Red Cross contracts, the camp director daughter and her father were ultimately responsible for lifeguard and water safety instructor training at their Summerkids camp. Yet, trial transcripts prove they intentionally never bothered to interview or reference check Cervantes. They intentionally never bothered to attend a single lifeguard training session at camp. They intentionally never bothered to read a lifeguard training manual. They intentionally never bothered to ask for proof of critical, required Red Cross testing.
During her 2020 deposition, the director-daughter said she did not know that Red Cross lifeguard training was roughly 27 intensive hours, including in-pool and written tests. During the federal trial, Forbes and his attorneys exhibited documents that proved a Red Cross representative did, in fact, previously tell her the precise training requirements.
Lying under oath, whether in a deposition or at trial, can be considered felony perjury, a jailable offense.
Nonetheless, the daughter-director and her father were ultimately responsible for cutting lifeguard training time by at least 75%. They were ultimately responsible for not administering required in-pool and written lifesaving tests – including CPR, automated external defibrillator and first aid – for their counselors who were in charge of very young children.
Forbes alerted the Red Cross about his investigative findings after which top officials immediately banned the camp operating family and Cervantes for life and revoked all counselor lifeguard and water safety certifications.
Forbes claimed that the camp family cut the training time and the certification fees to pocket more money for themselves at the risk of gravely harming children as young as three. During trial, Forbes’ team exhibited invoices from Cervantes which proved the camp family did, in fact, only pay a fraction of conventional Red Cross training fees.
Additional defendants named in the lawsuit included the assistant camp director who quit the camp and moved to Texas after Roxie drowned, four camp counselors, fake lifeguard instructor Andrew Cervantes, CPR instructor Trevor Boreham and the American Red Cross.
Forbes had already settled with Boreham and the American Red Cross for undisclosed terms more than a year before trial commenced.
Roxie’s buddy counselor was a first-year counselor who admitted to being distracted and failed to keep Roxie within an arm’s reach, which is a clear violation of Red Cross policy. He failed to administer critical initial rescue breaths and proper mouth sweeps when attempting CPR. He had little grasp of even basic rescue techniques and terminology.
He also made numerous assertions at trial which clearly contradicted his prior deposition testimony, whether outright lies or misleading the jury. Forbes previously made the public and Court aware of his disturbing social media posts including he and friends urinating on a black-owned restaurant in Silver Lake. Yet, he said at trial that he was in no way responsible for Roxie’s death.
The supervising counselor at the pool admitted to abandoning his lifeguard chair in direct violation of Red Cross policy and even a Summerkids camp policy. He appeared distracted, according to the 911 call he made. Although he claimed to be “part of management” and the head lifeguard, he abandoned the pool after Roxie lay lifeless on the deck, leaving untrained, inexperienced counselors to fend for themselves in a chaotic scene as they administered flawed and failed attempts at CPR. Yet, he said he was in no way responsible for Roxie’s death. He became a doctor in 2025.
The counselor in the shallow end said she failed to notice Roxie for upwards of five minutes and failed to keep her in an area dedicated to swimmers like Roxie who were not yet fully water-competent. She said she was only 5-10 feet away from Roxie when she drowned. Failing to properly scan a pool is a direct violation of Red Cross policy. Yet, she said she was in no way responsible for Roxie’s death.
The counselor in the deep end said she was throwing diving sticks into the 8’ deep end for very young children to retrieve from the bottom while Roxie drowned to death 5-10 feet from her. Playing with children instead of actively scanning is a direct violation of Red Cross policy. She was the only counselor to admit she was “partially responsible” for Roxie’s death despite maintaining that playing with children instead of lifeguarding was somehow acceptable.
The Assistant Director left the AED machine behind in her office while Roxie still had a faint heartbeat. She failed to properly interpret the AED machine. She failed to manage a proper CPR process. She admitted she yelled and screamed all the way to the pool while surrounded by very young children. She used incendiary language like “frail” and “not hardy” when describing Roxie to homicide detectives in an apparent attempt to distract from the negligence. She has not said she was in any way accountable for Roxie’s death.
The camp operating family leveraged a variety of means to delay the trial six times between the filing of the lawsuit November 6, 2019 until the opening day of trial January 13, 2026. Forbes said, “Their delays were so obvious to me as overt attempts to avoid accountability, but they could not deter me from securing the inevitable truth and fact on the witness stand that their acts were diabolical and deadly as I’ve said in legal documents for years.”
Forbes said he will soon post excerpts from the trial transcripts that support his shocking allegations. HE also said he knows a lot more about what happened that will emerge in a fortchoming documentary that he is directing, writing, editing and producing. “The film will enlighten other parents so they do not find themselves in the most gruesome situation that I have been in and will be for the rest of my days thanks to people who somehow want everyone to believe they were not grossly negligent amidst voluminous evidence to the contrary.”
Forbes filmed in 15 states, interviewing community stakeholders, attorneys, politicians, social scientists, victims and families of deceased campers to help parents better understand potential repercussions of sending children to unlicensed camps.
Forbes is working closely with California’s $350 billion Health and Human Services agencies to devise meaningful safety regulations after Governor Newsom signed Forbes’s camp safety bill into law. He has been working with federal lawmakers to enact a $4 billion nationwide safety act inclusive of camps, but the Trump administration severed funding for a number of child safety initiatives.