THE DIMASSA FAMILY TURNS ITS BACK ON CHILDREN AND CONVINCES YOU OTHERWISE
Cara DiMassa and her fatherJoe have deceived thousands of families and turned their backs on child health and safety.
By Doug Forbes
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.
Cara DiMassa knows a lot about turning her backs on adults and children. DiMassa is owner-director of Summerkids, the recreational child care facility where Roxie drowned last year.
We recently deposed her — a nine hour nails-on-a-blackboard ordeal. When all was said and done, my wife Elena approached DiMassa for the first time in 16 months. DiMassa literally, not figuratively, turned her back to Elena. A week earlier, Elena ran into DiMassa at a Target. DiMassa gestured to her daughters that they turn their backs. All three did.
Think of that cowardice. Think of what that act denotes for children, her children.
After DiMassa illustrated her cowardice to everyone in the deposition room, Elena told her she would never forgive her. I approached DiMassa seconds later. DiMassa also turned her back to me. I said, “Good luck, Cara DiMassa, you are in for a long road.”
Roxie did not have a long road. She had six years on the planet. Six years. But our daughter never turned her back on people. She looked them directly in the eye, regardless of the circumstances.
Cara DiMassa turned her back, because she chooses not to face the truth. She cannot look us in the eye after being responsible for killing our daughter. It was astonishing to see her wriggle away from the truth while under oath. Her anxiety filled the deposition. She was drowning in unconscionable denial.
We now have piles and piles of documents and hours and hours of audio and video testimony from more than 10 people, including DiMassa’s employees. And there’s much more to come. We have almost all of the facts we need. We have all the admissions we need. We have all the truths to the lies we have heard for more than 16 months. 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 in a pile of ashes in a bamboo box in our back closet. I am falling apart as I write these lines, because I miss my girl, my baby, more and more every day. This agony has aged me by decades.
And what does Cara DiMassa do?
She turns her back on me, my wife, our daughter, 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 Cara DiMassa. She will realize this in very short order.
Following DiMassa’s profoundly haunting admissions, it is now officially, abundantly and irrefutably clear. The DiMassa family killed our daughter by way of outrageous neglectand apparent fraud. They also systematically orchestrated and continue to orchestrate a coverup.
Their employees, including former Assistant Director Jaimi Harrison and multiple counselors, 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 is closing and closing fast.
Not one person at Summerkids has exhibited pain, remorse, honesty, integrity, compassion. Not one person who worked at Summerkids has reached out to us to ask how we are, what they can do to help advance the foundation’s missions. We wondered how this could be.
Cara DiMassa admitted under oath that she demanded that nobody communicate with us. This is called 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 systematically misled thousands upon thousands of people, let alone endangered children?
It’s also insidious that DiMassa and her family took out a 1 million dollar insurance policy to cover 900 children in their care each summer. Every parent who has sent their child to Summerkids should digest how profoundly disturbing this is. It should serve as a symbol of the utter lack of value the DiMassas 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 insurance 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 the camp killed our daughter. 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 the DiMassas are ultimately responsible for killing our child, 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.
Cara DiMassa is in a class of her own when it comes to failing children. Her community, her church, her fellow board members, her school contacts do not yet know the real Cara DiMassa. But they will.
We watched for hours as DiMassa systematically perjured herself. She answered questions as if she were caged. Her disdain for transparency and truth and her utter disregard for health and safety processes and protocols were ominously clear. What also crystallized are the dark ambitions and actions of DiMassa’s father Joseph.
Again, for the many Pasadenans who know him and this family, be prepared for a disturbing reality check.
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. Greater Los Angeles will soon understand the deeply unsettling reality of this family. And that reality will almost certainly unsettle thousands of parents, community organizations and others who have trusted them for decades.
DiMassa’s attorney knows a thing or two about people who ruin lives and orchestrate coverups. After all, Margaret “Peggy” Holm is defense counsel for USA Gymnastics, which was accused of covering up for Larry Nassar, the serial rapist and abuser of dozens and dozens of teenage girls the same age as DiMassa’s daughters. Nassar now faces 175 years in prison. That case is far from over.
Holm and her client, the DiMassa family, should also prepare for the fact that our case is far from over and far from what it appears to be at the moment. Our case is not only about the killing of a little girl and the coverup that ensued. It’s about the long-term effects of that killing on a greater community and on state and federal standards and practices, all of which are going to point directly back to them.
Sadly, 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 DiMassas and Ms. Holm can equivocate, they can try to mitigate, they can continue to attempt every traditional trick in the book. But they have met their match. We are two people, two parents, who will and did do anything and everything for the child that they loved to the moon and back. That same child adored other children and adults and demanded that they too be happy and healthy.
That’s what we will remember most about our daughter — that she was relentless in her fight for goodness and truth and decency. She was such a good little citizen who lived to love. That’s what we will remember.
Well, that and the fact that we sent her to Summerkids expecting her to come home that Friday.