A FAMILY TURNS ITS BACK ON CHILDREN AND CONVINCES YOU OTHERWISE
Summerkids camp owners have deceived thousands of families and turned their backs on child health and safety, according to volumes of publicly available legal documents, trial transcripts, admissions and exhibits.
Advocacy is brutal. You run a hundred marathons to take a single step forward. And that’s if you’re lucky. But advocacy is all we have since our daughter Roxie was killed. My wife and I struggle to put our shoes on, let alone run the race each day.
Our advocacy efforts are anchored to holding ourselves and adults accountable for critical decisions related to water safety and camp safety. Child drownings are on the rise. Camp and recreational child care facilities are rife with policy and protocol gaps that lead to catastrophic outcomes. We hear about such things all of the time. All of the time.
We adults cannot turn our backs on children, whether it be at camps or in pools or in homes or schools.
Right here in our very own backyard of Pasadena, Altadena and greater Los Angeles, children are dying and suffering due to wholly preventable policy gaps, and yet folks continue to ignore our pleas, including our legislators, our community gatekeepers and the very people who are operating these facilities. They are turning their backs.
Drowning at Tom Sawyer camp. Oh well. Drowning at the YMCA. Oh well. Drowning at Summerkids. Moving right along.
We are not going to turn our backs on children. We are not going to stop exposing these preventable epidemics and holding folks accountable until, collectively, we garner health and safety measures that children deserve.
The Summerkids camp director turned her back on adults and children, according to the allegations within thousands of pages of legal documents, admissions at trial and in depositions while under oath and hundreds of exhibits.
Her deposition — a nine hour nails-on-a-blackboard ordeal. And now that it is public, we can say that her behavior and responses were shocking. Roxie’s mother Elena approached the director-owner for the first time in 16 months. The owner literally, not figuratively, turned her back to Elena like a child in a huff. A week earlier, Elena ran into the director at Target. The director gestured to her daughters that they turn their backs. All three did.
Think of that behavior. Think of what those acts illustrate for children, her children.
After she illustrated remorselessness during her deposition, Elena told her she would never forgive her. Elena’s husband Doug told the director, “Good luck, you are in for a long road if I have anything to say about it.”
That road was long. Elena died from a broken heart, mind and body. Doug’s mother died from the same. But Doug kept his promise and stayed on that road for them… seven years later and six trial delays by the owners of Summerkids, specifically the director-owner.
Roxie did not have a long road. She had six years on the planet. Six years. But she never turned her back on people. She looked them directly in the eye, regardless of the circumstances.
Summerkids owners and staff turned their backs, because they chose not to face or share the truth with our family whose beloved child died at their camp. They cannot look us in the eye after being responsible for the acts that took Roxie’s breath away for good, according to volumes of legal documents, transcripts, exhibits and admissions. It was unsettling to witness the lack accountability, the lack of remorse while under oath. It was yet another drowning… drowning in unconscionable denial.
We now have piles and piles of documents and hours and hours of audio and video testimony from dozens of witnesses. And there’s much more to come. We have all the facts we need. And some that are not yet disclosed. We have all the admissions we need. We have all the proof of truths to refute the lies we have heard for seven years. And yet, we still don’t have the most important piece of evidence.
Our daughter.
That’s because Roxie’s bones, her organs and her soul are ashes on a mountaintop in northern California. This agony is nearly unbearable.
And what does the camp director-owner do?
She turns her back on us, our community, the people who have paid her thousands upon thousands of dollars to take care of their children. And she turns her back on the truth. But the truth will not turn its back on her... never. She will realize this in very short order.
Following her profoundly haunting admissions, it is now abundantly clear. Summerkids owners apparently prioritized money over safety. They also prioritized muzzling of answers over accountability that we so desperately, agonizingly sought for years.
Their employees are in no way oblivious, nor can they expect that even attempting to plead ignorance is a way out. It’s truth or it’s nothing. Their window for accountability has closed. Similar to other incidents of horrific camp harm around this nation, the truths and facts and abundant documentation must become visible for the nation to see. Otherwise, we will not learn how to prevent such incidents and their coverups from happening again and again and again.
Not one person at Summerkids has exhibited remorse, compassion, full accountability. Not one person who worked at Summerkids has reached out to ask how we are, what they can do to help advance the child safety nonprofit established in Roxie’s honor.
The camp director admitted under oath that she demanded that nobody communicate with us. This is a gag order. It’s also insidious. And it’s inhumane. Nonetheless shouldn’t employees and affiliates of Summerkids have disregarded such dark demands? What is their allegiance to a family that has, for decades, misled thousands upon thousands of people, let alone endangered children, according to court documents, trial testimony, exhibits, admissions and experts?
It’s also shocking that Summerkids owners took out a paltry $1 million dollar insurance policy to cover upwards of 900 children in their care each summer. Every parent who has sent their child to Summerkids should digest how profoundly disturbing this is. But is it rare at summer camps? Sadly, the answer is a resounding “no.”
This should serve as a symbol of the utter lack of value these camp owners ultimately place on each child’s head. Parents, we implore you to ask camp operators detailed questions about their insurance policies.
And if you think that camps accredited by or being members of the American Camp Association, like Summerkids, is further assurance that a camp operator will institute proper health and safety protocols, think again.
The ACA is the nation’s only camp accreditation body. We uncovered the fact that their accreditation procedures are dangerously flawed if not primarily a paper tiger. Their lobbying efforts further erode child protections in favor of camp profiteering.
We have also recently discovered that top ACA officials lied to us about their knowledge of our daughter’s death and their assistance in pushing to accredit Summerkids almost immediately after Roxie’s brutal death. Much more on this story to come. Parents, we implore you to rethink the value of ACA accreditation and contact us for further information.
Again, our organization, and we as parents, will never relent until we uncover every iota of what happened and why. That is what advocacy is all about. That is what advocacy looks like. That is how change happens.
And believe us when we say that our advocacy spans from Summerkids to Sacramento to some of the nation’s most notable youth-serving organizations whose feet we currently hold to the fire, including the American Camp Association.
And while Summerkids owners are ultimately responsible for a child’s barbaric death, as they have only recently admmitted, aquatics organizations and others are complicit via inefficacious policies. We are demanding that they make sweeping changes at full speed. The same goes for the ACA. The same goes for state and county health agencies. And the list goes on.
We do not relish this work. We do it, because we cannot bear hearing about another Roxie dying due to adults who fail children.
The Summerkids director-owner is not in a class of her own when it comes misleading people about Roxie’s death, according to court documents, trial testimony, exhibits, admissions and experts. Her community, her church, her fellow board members, her school contacts do not yet know all of the revelations in this matter. But they should. Because they too have children to consider.
We watched for hours as the camp owner systematically perjured herself, according to legal documents and admissions. Shocking, considering she is a former Los Angles Times reporter.
Facts are ambitious. With a little nutrition, they eventually make their way to the surface. And in this case, they have, they did and they will continue to do so. These facts will almost certainly unsettle thousands of parents, community organizations and others who have trusted this family with their most precious cargo for decades.
The Summerkids owners’ attorney knows a thing or two about people who ruin lives and orchestrate coverups. After all, Margaret “Peggy” Holm was defense counsel for USA Gymnastics, which was accused of covering up for Larry Nassar, the serial rapist and abuser of hundred of teenage girls who are now women, just like the Summerkids’ camp director-owner’s daughters.
Holm and her Summerkids clients do not seem to understand the unprecedented federal lawsuit against them is not only about the brutal death of a little girl and the ensuing coverup. It’s about the long-term effects of those acts on a greater community and on state and federal standards and practices.
The Summerkids story is far from unique. Again, this is why we do not sleep. It is also the cold, hard reality of advocacy — being embroiled in matters that are ugly, unfair, excruciatingly challenging, and in our case, highly personal. But we must assert ourselves as adults as an example for our kids.
The Summerkids family owners and their staff and Peggy Holm can equivocate, they can try to mitigate, they can continue to attempt every traditional legal or illicit trick in the book. But they have met their match… a parent, a father, a husband who will and did do anything and everything to land justice for his family and expose those who ended his joy.
Roxie was relentless in her fight for goodness and truth and decency. She was an amazing young citizen who lived to love. That’s what we will remember most.
Well, that and the fact that we sent her to Summerkids expecting her to come home.