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, including fraud, according to the legal claims they filed and the exhibits and testimony that they provided to support those claims. The camp is owned and operated by an Altadena family consisting of a mother and father who are former Pasadena 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 at least 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 shocking actions made by the camp-operating family.
Forbes said that his wife’s dying words, which he recorded, were to get as much justice for Roxie as possible. “I want to believe 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. It was no different with Summerkids camp, which actively promoted its swimming pool and aquatics programming.
Forbes discovered that, from 2006-2014, the camp director-owner and her father, also a Summerkids co-owner, hired a former lifeguard instructor named Kasey Bell who provided guidance to Summerkids counselors but had no intention of legitimately training and certifying them as American Red Cross lifeguards. The camp owners admitted at trial that they knew Bell would not be able to train and certify the counselors as legitimate lifeguards.
Nonetheless, the daughter and her father intentionally chose to not legitimately train and certify their counselors as lifeguards and water safety instructors for roughly eight years while actively promoting to parents that their counselors were, in fact, legitimately trained and certified, according to publicly available archives of web pages and other documents that Forbes exhibited at trial.
From 2014-2019, the daughter and father hired a different person named Andrew Cervantes to provide the same illegitimate service. It took Forbes only a week to also discover that Cervantes had fraudulently certified himself as a Red Cross lifeguard and instructor. Cervantes admitted to his actions in a taped interview and in his deposition. Therefore, he fraudulently certified more than 100 Summerkids counselors as lifeguards and water safety instructors during his work for Summerkids owners.
According to American Red Cross contracts that Forbes obtained, the camp director daughter and her father were ultimately responsible for overseeing and ensuring the efficacy of lifeguard and water safety instructor training at their Summerkids camp. Yet, trial transcripts prove they intentionally never interviewed or reference checked Cervantes. They intentionally never attended a single lifeguard training session at camp. They intentionally never read a lifeguard training manual. They intentionally never requested proof of required Red Cross training or testing. They intentionally enabled the fraudulent certification process.
Forbes determined that by avoiding the time required to meet Red Cross training and testing protocols, the camp owners were able to pocket an additional $7 thousand dollars each year at the risk of putting very young children in harm’s way. Forbes was able to obtain multiple invoices over multiple years which prove how they pocketed the extra money.
The Summerkids camp director-owner said that her family had enrolled roughly 10,000 children since the camp’s inception. Children as young as three were in the Summerkids pool under the supervision of fake lifeguards.
During her 2020 deposition, the camp director-owner said she did not know that Red Cross lifeguard training was roughly 27 intensive hours, including in-pool testing and final written tests. During the federal trial, Forbes provided documents that proved a Red Cross representative did, in fact, previously advise her of the precise training requirements. She ultimately admitted that this was true.
The director-owner and her father admitted they 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 general counsel for the Red Cross about his investigation after which top officials immediately banned Summerkids and Cervantes for life and revoked all counselor lifeguard and water safety certifications.
Additional defendants named in the lawsuit included the assistant camp director who quit the camp and moved to Texas after Roxie drowned, four fake lifeguard 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 said he was in the pool when she drowned. He was a first-year counselor who admitted to being distracted and failed to keep a learning swimmer like Roxie within an arm’s length, which is a clear violation of Red Cross policy.
He failed to administer critical initial rescue breaths and proper mouth sweeps when attempting CPR, which also constitute deadly mistakes. He had little grasp of the most basic lifeguarding and rescue skills. He admitted that his time with Cervantes was a fraction of Red Cross requirement and could not even describe the instruction that he allegedly received. He also made numerous assertions at trial which clearly contradicted his prior deposition testimony.
Yet, he said at trial that he was in no way responsible for Roxie’s death.
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.
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 that Forbes obtained. Forbes also obtained a recording of the 911 call during which this counselor was distracted.
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 too 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 too 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’ water 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, according to medical records Forbes obtained. She failed to properly interpret the AED machine. She failed to apply proper AED pads. She failed to manage proper CPR administration overall, according to multiple experts.
She admitted that she yelled and screamed all the way to the pool while surrounded by very young children, some of whom became traumatized by the horrific event. 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.
Forbes discovered, through an abundance of documents and admissions, that the camp director-owner holed up in her office for at least 15 minutes while Roxie lay dying then dead on her pool deck. She admitted that she called her own parents and refused to call Forbes and his wife. She did not make herself available to first responders until after she eventually emerged from her office as EMS was leaving for the hospital.
She sent an email to thousands of current and former camp parents only a few hours after Roxie drowned to death in their pool. She made numerous clearly and provably false statements, including that Summerkids counselors were certified Red Cross lifeguards and that Roxie had only been without supervision for 10-15 seconds.
She also demanded that parents not pick up their traumatized children early because they ”want to keep the day as normal as possible.” They never shut down the camp for even one minute.
She admitted at trial that she immediately removed Forbes and his wife from all communications and falsely told major media and thousands of camp parents that the couple demanded their privacy. In fact, Forbes and Matyas said they desperately sought answers but were stifled by this intentional public relations effort to prevent those answers from surfacing.
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 recorded his wife’s final wishes a day before she died in their home. Matyas told him, “Get as much justice for Roxie as possible.”
Forbes said a forthcoming documentary that he is directing, writing, editing and producing will expose people to the dark legacy of harm at American summer camps such as Summerkids. “It’s a film about how far a father will go to honor his daughter and wife in their deaths as he did during their lives. It’s also a film that enlightens families so they do not find themselves in the gruesome situation that I endure, thanks to people who prioritized profiteering over proper protections for our most precious cargo… children.”
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 measure called the Summer for All Act, inclusive of camps. The Trump administration said it will not support the Act, but Sen. Chris Murphy’s office said they will continue to pursue its passage.