Actress Hunter Tylo (Taylor Forrester) has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against a social worker whom she blames for the 2007 drowning death of her 19-year-old son.
The star of The Bold and the Beautiful alleges that Shanna Downing of the Horizon Family Therapy & Wellness Center instructed Tylo's son, Michael Edward Tylo, to stop taking his seizure medication, which ultimately caused Michael to suffer a seizure and drown in the family's pool.
In court documents filed in Clark County, Tylo claims that Downing told the Tylo family that Michael's seizures were "due to the stress he was experiencing due to his parents break-up [and] once the stress was eliminated... his seizures would disappear."
"That...care, advice, and treatment rendered ... caused [Michael's] seizures to continue and led to his untimely death," the lawsuit states.
On October 18, 2007, Michael Tylo, Jr., drowned and was pronounced dead at 11:55 p.m. A family spokesperson stated that the young man was at the family's Las Vegas-area house with his older step-brother, Christopher, and was believed to have suffered a seizure and fallen into the pool after stepping outside the home to use his cell phone.
Michael, who was known as "Mickey," was Tylo's son with former husband Michael Tylo, Sr. The pair also has two daughter, Izabella and Katya.
The lawsuit marks Tylo's second lawsuit against Downing and the Horizon Family Therapy & Wellness Center. Last year, Tylo unsuccessfully tried to amend a 2006 lawsuit to include a wrongful death claim.
But Clark County District Court Judge Timothy Williams refused to allow the wrongful death claims to be added without an affidavit from a "qualified expert establishing a causal link between therapy provided by Downing to Michael E. Tylo II and Michael E. Tylo II's subsequent death."
Meanwhile, an attorney for Downing called previous attempts to link his client to Michael's death "ridiculous."
"Plaintiffs can draw no causal connection between counseling that ended nearly two years prior to what is universally accepted as an accidental drowning," attorney Michael Shannon wrote in 2008. "The available records in this case demonstrate that Mickey was being treated for his seizure disorder during the approximate two-year period after he stopped seeing Downing," Shannon wrote.
