Southlake hospital hit with lawsuit, federal citation after North Texas tween nearly died

Nicholas Mata just wants to play football.

The Roanoke tween already has the size to back up his dreams: At 12 years old, he’s 6-foot-2.

His parents — Reasa Selph and Antonio Mata — thought he was on track toward that goal. That is, until a relatively mild illness spiraled into a near-death experience and left their son with lifelong health complications.

In December 2023, Nicholas’ parents took him to Methodist Southlake Medical Center first for a relatively mild sickness and then again for a much more severe illness. The family alleges that the medical providers for that second visit ignored the boy’s obvious signs of medical distress, sending him home when he should’ve been admitted. As a result, the family says, Nicholas nearly died.

For more than a year and a half now, Nicholas and his parents have been coping with the fallout.

The 12-year-old is still in regular medical appointments and treatments. He’s spent much of this summer at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and the family recently learned that Nicholas’ heart isn’t functioning correctly.

And the family believes it all could’ve been prevented. As they juggle ongoing medical care, they’ve also set off on a quest for accountability.

Selph filed a complaint with federal regulators, who then issued a violation notice to the hospital. The family also recently refiled a lawsuit against the Southlake hospital, naming the hospital itself, Dr. Teresa Proietti and the physicians group Emergency Medicine Consultants.

Proietti did not respond to phone calls to her office. In a succinct legal filing, the doctor denied the allegations.

A spokesperson for the Methodist Health System said in an email that the system does not comment on pending litigation. A spokesperson for Emergency Medicine Consultants similarly declined to comment on active litigation.

At the end of July, however, Methodist Health System submitted legal filings to the court, saying the lawsuit’s assertions are vague and not sufficiently supported by the evidence.

In the filing, the health system also wrote that it is not responsible for Proietti’s actions. The events of December 2023 were “wholly and completely unavoidable and without any negligence on the part of” the hospital, according to the filing.

The flurry of activity in the wake of Nicholas’ near-death experience is a testament to the amount of attention one family can garner, when they have the time and resources to dedicate. But they know not every family would be able to put the same energy and money into the cause — and, to Selph, that’s enough reason in itself to keep pushing.

The timeline

It started with what seemed to be a case of the flu.

In mid-December 2023, Nicholas was a fifth grader at Liberty Christian School in Argyle. The school sent him home sick, and Selph then took him to get medical care at Methodist Southlake. The hospital’s providers gave Nicholas an IV and sent him home to rest.

For a while, it seemed like he was getting better. By the 22nd, though, Nicholas had gone downhill. By the 23rd, Selph and Mata could barely get Nicholas to move around, so they took him back to Methodist Southlake.

“We were there for a little under two hours,” Selph said, “and they just said, ‘Hey, it’s viral. Go home. He’ll be fine.’”

On Christmas morning, Nicholas was doing markedly worse, Selph said. He could barely get out of bed. He wouldn’t eat. And Selph distinctly remembers that her son looked gray and yellow.

This time, the family took Nicholas to Cook Children’s Medical Center in Fort Worth, where the medical providers swarmed the sick fifth grader.

“I had no idea until later how really, really sick he was,” Selph said.

On that first day at Cook Children’s, Selph remembers Nicholas was throwing up.

“He starts to throw up and I grab the blue bag and I give him the blue bag and we’re holding it,” Selph said. “And he vomits a pint of blood.”

For Selph, it was one of the scariest moments of her son’s illness.

The Cook Children’s providers determined Nicholas was in septic shock. Septic shock is an extreme response to an infection, and it can worsen rapidly as the body’s organs shut down. The condition has a high mortality rate.

“They came in and they just said, ‘We don’t know how this is going to turn out. We’d like to bring in a priest for you,’” Selph said.

Nicholas had a weeklong stay in the ICU at Cook Children’s, punctuated by several invasive procedures including intubation. After the ICU, he spent another several weeks in the hospital before he was discharged. In total, he was hospitalized for more than a month.

Nicholas survived, although Selph said there were long stretches where she thought he wouldn’t. Afterward, he had to relearn how to walk. And now, he has health complications that will likely be lifelong.

Importantly for Nicholas, some of the complications may also infringe on his ability to play football.

The family believes the worst of the illness and the complications could’ve been avoided if Methodist Southlake providers had taken better care of Nicholas on his second visit to the ER.

Pushing for accountability

In the months since Nicholas was discharged from the hospital, his family — and especially Selph — has searched for ways to hold Methodist Southlake and its providers responsible for what they see as medical malpractice.

Selph filed a complaint with the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which regulates hospitals that accept Medicare and Medicaid, even if the patient in question has other forms of health care coverage.

In mid-April 2024, according to a CMS document that Selph provided to The Dallas Morning News, the federal agency found that the Southlake hospital had failed to meet standards of care in Nicholas’ case. The document does not specifically name Nicholas, but it describes the unnamed patient as an 11-year-old and describes the same medical situation. Selph also said the document does refer to her son.

Specifically, the federal notice says Methodist Southlake failed to provide a proper medical screening and “discharged Patient #1 with a diagnosis of upper respiratory infection despite Patient #1 having abnormal labs, elevated heart rate and decreased blood pressure.”

The family also filed a civil lawsuit against the hospital in September, but dropped it in favor of pushing for legislative action during Texas’ 2025 session. Now that the session is over, the family has refiled that Tarrant County lawsuit against Methodist Southlake and the treating doctor, Proietti.

They argue the hospital and the medical team were negligent in their treatment of Nicholas.

While a spokesperson for Methodist declined to comment, attorneys for the health system wrote in legal filings that the family’s claims are not supported by the evidence and that the hospital is not responsible for Proietti’s actions. Proietti wrote in a short legal filing at the beginning of August that she denies the allegations.

Selph is also pushing for repercussions from the Texas Medical Board and the Texas Board of Nursing, and she’s looking into possible criminal charges, too.

All of these paths take time. Selph said it’s been an enormous amount of work to file and follow up with the various enforcement mechanisms.

But Shane Langston, the family’s attorney, said the case is strong.

“I’ve been doing this a long time,” Langston said, “and we don’t file a case like this, against medical providers, unless it’s legitimate and strongly supported by our medical specialists who reviewed the case.”

‘There’s got to be change’

There are moments of the past year and a half that are seared into their memories.

Selph remembers when they got home from the hospital, after Nicholas was discharged, and all of their Christmas decorations were up. It was, by then, well over a month since the holiday.

The whole family struggled with the strong association they had between Christmas — a favorite holiday — and Nicholas’ near death. Nicholas’ dad, Antonio Mata, said that when he thinks back on how sick his son was that day, he’s washed with guilt.

“How could I miss what he was trying to tell us?” Mata said.

For their next Christmas, in 2024, Selph organized a wild departure from their usual rituals. They spent the day indoor skydiving.

“This past Christmas, we had a really tough time, because nobody wanted to be here,” Selph said.

The family doesn’t want anyone else to experience what they have experienced: the panic, the weeks at the hospital, the guilt, the rearranging of their entire lives.

“We don’t want this to happen to someone else,” Selph said. “And if we can prevent just one person from going through this, that would be a win for us.”

It could be months or years before their lawsuit is resolved, and the legal process can be both costly and time intensive.

“But it’s worth it,” Mata said. “There’s got to be change.”