‘They almost killed my child’: Family accuses Southlake hospital of negligence
A North Texas family is suing Methodist Southlake Medical Center, accusing the hospital and one of its doctors of ignoring their son’s obvious signs of medical distress and discharging him without giving him the proper care.
Nicholas Mata, 12, is still recovering from his near-death experience, said his mom Reasa Selph of Roanoke.
“They almost killed my child,” Selph said. “And no one is holding them accountable.”
Selph has been working since 2023 to try and do so. She’s filed complaints with the Texas Medical Board, the Texas Board of Nursing, the federal government, and advocated for legislative changes in Austin in addition to filing the lawsuit in Tarrant County District Court.
“Our whole goal is that this just doesn’t happen again,” Selph said.
The lawsuit, which was first reported by the Dallas Morning News, accuses the hospital, Dr. Teresa Proietti, and three physician staffing groups of medical negligence and violating the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act. Methodist Southlake declined to comment on pending litigation. In a legal filing, the hospital denied the family’s allegations. Attorneys listed for Proietti and the physician staffing groups did not immediately reply to requests for comment, although Proietti denied the allegations in an Aug. 4 legal filing.
The dispute started in December 2023, when Selph and her husband Antonio Mata twice took Nicholas to Methodist Southlake Medical Center. Nicholas’s symptoms started with the flu, but by Dec. 23 he couldn’t walk, and Selph and Mata took Nicholas to Methodist Southlake for the second time. The family was there for about two hours before Nicholas was discharged again, diagnosed with nausea, vomiting, and an upper respiratory infection.
On Christmas morning, Selph grew concerned again when Nicholas didn’t come downstairs to open presents. He was yellow and gray, and his blood pressure was so low that Selph thought the machine was broken, she said. She called their family doctor at home, and the doctor told them to take Nicholas straight to Cook Children’s Medical Center in Fort Worth.
There, Nicholas was admitted into the intensive care unit and doctors told Selph he was in septic shock. Septic shock is the most severe form of sepsis, and occurs when the body has an extreme reaction to an infection. At one point, Nicholas threw up a pint of blood, Selph said, and looked at his mother and said “it’s OK if I die.”
Nicholas spent the next month in the hospital, and has spent the months since continuing to receive medical treatment to recover.
While Nicholas has been recovering, Selph has been trying to hold Methodist accountable. She and Mata first sued the hospital last year, before dropping the suit to focus on legislative advocacy. They refiled the lawsuit in June. In addition, Selph complained to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which regulates most hospitals in the U.S. CMS surveyed the hospital in 2024, and found that the hospital had failed to provide “an appropriate medical screening exam,” according to a copy of the federal agency’s survey included in the legal filings. CMS surveyors found that Nicholas had abnormal labs, elevated heart rate and decreased blood pressure when he was admitted to Methodist, but that those abnormalities were not communicated to Nicholas’ parents before he was discharged. The hospital “failed to recognize and treat sepsis and was inappropriately discharged,” according to the federal survey.
