Why We Do This Work
According to court filings, trial transcripts, exhibits and testimony, Summerkids camp owners hired Andrew Cervantes who fraudulently certified Summerkids counselors as lifeguards. Cervantes admitted he had fraudulently certified himself as Red Cross instructor. Summerkids owners admitted they intentionally never supervised Cervantes, they never demanded proper training or any testing, they never followed the Red Cross contract requirements for which they signed off and they never bothered to know anything about the Red Cross lifeguard program in general.
After seven years, Summerkids owners-operators admitted at trial that they were “ultimately responsible.”
Following a deeply researched investigation by Roxie’s father Doug Forbes (who has a background in investigative journalism), the American Red Cross banned Summerkids owner-operators and Cervantes for life.
Publicly available documents and admissions from former counselors and a former lifeguard instructor show that Summerkids camp owners manifested fraudulent lifeguard certifications since at least 2006. By doing so, invoices and other documents show that they were able to pocket an extra $7 thousand dollars that they would have had to spend on training time and other associated fees. The camp owners admitted that they had put thousands of children as young as three years old into that pool with fake lifeguards.
Summerkids owners were therefore ultimately responsible for the fraudulent lifeguard and water safety instructor certification of approximately 100 counselors.
Over the course of at least 15 years, Summerkids camp owners falsely promoted to thousands of unknowing parents that the camp counselors were properly trained and certified Red Cross lifeguards and water safety instructors.
According to volumes of documents and testimony, the camp director refused to call Roxie’s parents as Roxie lay dead on her pool deck. Instead, she admitted that she holed up in her office and called her own parents who co-owned Summerkids camp with her and her brother. The camp director is a former Los Angeles Times reporter. Her brother is an emergency room doctor. Their parents are former Pasadena City College professors.
Documents and her own trial testimony prove that she also immediately shut out Roxie’s parents, Doug Forbes and Elena Matyas (Elena died in 2022), from all communications, thereby preventing them from getting answers they desperately sought. She also admitted that she refused to return their tuition check until Forbes hired an attorney to demand a refund months later.
The director and her family prevented parents from picking up their traumatized children after Roxie drowned, according to an email they submitted to Forbes only a few hours after Roxie suffered her gruesome, preventable death. The family kept the camp open the entire day after Roxie drowned in the morning. The director’s explanations about Roxie’s drowning included numerous lies, according to the same documents, admissions and interviews with other camp parents who said the director said Roxie died of a medical issue.
Every medical report, including the coroner’s report, shows that Roxie died of nothing other than drowning, which is a wholly preventable circumstance.
Therefore, this foundation and this website was established for these reasons:
To honor Roxie by preventing other children from being harmed in camps or aquatics environments
To hold parties accountable for harming children
To help aggrieved families garner the justice they deserve
To educate and advocate for long overdue changes in the largely unregulated summer camp industry
READ MORE HERE →
(All applicable court documents, exhibits and trial transcript excerpts are available upon request.)
What We Do
WE ARE THE ONLY CAMP SAFETY FOUNDATION IN AMERICA. This may be hard to believe, considering roughly 30,000 day and resident (overnight) camps represent a $26 billion industry serving 25 million children and 1.5 million camp employees. Camps are beloved. They can provide opportunities for social, emotional, cultural and physical growth. However, a stunning lack of safety regulations fails to prevent sexual abuse, emotional abuse, disease, injuries and deaths from enduring at camps. We work with vital stakeholders to maximize benefit and minimize harm.
More on Safety for Children’s Camps →
The U.S. has roughly 10 million private and public pools and 100,000 miles of exterior and interior open water shoreline. Childhood drowning continues to be a national health and safety crisis that does not receive the attention it so desperately deserves. Legislation is sorely lacking. Water safety education is rarely taught in school health programs. And, nearly 90% of young children drown in pools, bathtubs and even buckets of water under the supervision of nearby adults.
More on Childhood Drowning Prevention →
Who Roxie Was
CHILDREN DESERVE NOTHING BUT THE BEST HEALTH AND SAFETY PROTECTIONS.
Roxie will be 6 1/2 forever.
Learning to ride
Always dancing.
Final Video
Roxie adored the magic of the Pacific
Where You Have Seen Us
What the Latest Data Tells Us
→ Drowning increased by 28% among children ages 1–4 in 2022 compared to 2019.
→ Drowning increased 28% among Black people in 2021 compared to 2019.
→ Over half (55%) of U.S. adults have never taken a swimming lesson.
→ Drowning remains the number one cause of death for children ages 1–4.
→ We must immediately being looking at this national safety epidemic through an entirely new lens.
And that’s exactly what we are going to do.
