By Bruce Vielmetti, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel –
MILWAUKEE — In 2010, Terrell Travis Jr. was 12 years old and dying of brain cancer.
When a Michigan-based organization called American Dream Flite offered him a chance to visit Disney World, his mother thanked the Lord for the opportunity to give Terrell something to look forward to, some sunshine, company and pleasure in his difficult life.
But the trip turned suddenly tragic when Terrell drowned in the swimming pool of an Orlando hotel.
Now his mother, Angela Jefferson, has sued American Dream Flite and its insurer, contending that the trip organizer’s negligence led to her son’s death.
“He was supposed to be constantly supervised,” said her attorney, Todd Korb. He said Terrell had gone on a local trip months earlier, through the Make-A-Wish Foundation, when it appeared his life expectancy was very short. But he later had surgery that seemed to help his condition, and he was feeling better and up to the Florida trip when his doctors mentioned it, Korb said. He said Terrell could swim but suffered a seizure.
Parents are not allowed on the trips, Korb said.
The wrongful death action, filed in Milwaukee County Circuit Court, has been assigned to Judge William Brash III. It alleges the American Dream Flite organizers failed to exercise reasonable care in supervising Terrell, and it seeks unspecified damages.
According to Osceola County Sheriff’s office reports, Terrell was swimming about 8 p.m. April 28, 2010, in the main pool at the Radisson Resort Orlando in Kissimmee with some other children who were on the trip. He told them he didn’t want to play a game about who could hold their breath underwater the longest, but when they surfaced, Terrell was under water.
The girls who were also swimming thought Terrell had decided to join the game late, but after he failed to come up after a minute, one of them saw him on the bottom and pulled up him up. There was no lifeguard on duty.
Medical professionals who were along as chaperons on the trip but who didn’t witness Terrell go under started resuscitation efforts immediately, but Terrell later died of what an Orlando medical examiner deemed complications of near drowning. Residual glioblastoma multiforme — the most common and malignant human brain tumor — was listed as a contributing factor.
The listed agent for American Dream Flite did not return a phone message.
Al Kutchins, a Chicago-area accountant who served as an adviser to Children’s Oncology Services of Michigan, which operated as Dream Flite, said the group ceased operations last year because its founders were getting too old and younger members had not taken over.
Kutchins said the group ran 21 trips to Florida for children with cancer over about 30 years.
He could not address the specific claims of Jefferson’s lawsuit.
The Illinois-based Children’s Oncology Services Inc. runs camps for children with cancer in Illinois and Wisconsin, Kutchins said. It is not a defendant in the lawsuit.
