Chloe Williamson says she still doesn’t know all the details that led a 15-year-old, while fleeing a Johnston residential youth home, to allegedly shove her mother with such force that the resulting injuries would take her life.

But she does know Ellipsis’ claim that Kathleen Galloway-Menke’s death May 14 was an isolated tragedy does not ring true to her.

Until April, Williamson, 25, had worked at the same all-male youth home with her 50-year-old single mother, who had a quarter-century’s experience with kids who have special needs. Williamson said she and her mother both worked directly with, and had previously been threatened by, Jovahn Mathis, a roughly 200-pound, 6-foot teen whose assaultive behavior resulted in multiple police calls to the youth home prior to the May 8 attack.

“I have dealt with a lot of aggressive kids, but I have never seen this level of violence and strength from a kid,” Williamson said.

She said Ellipsis had no security guards and no cameras and that the walkie-talkies its program staff used to communicate during crises didn’t always work. She said she believes Mathis needed a more secure environment like the State Training School at Eldora.

“Everyone in my building and my cottage knew. We tried telling Ellipsis this was a problem and (the child’s placement) wasn’t the right fit, but we didn’t have the support,” she said.

Ellipsis CEO says youth home has worked to improve safety

In a statement to Watchdog, Ellipsis CEO Chris Koepplin said, “Given the nature of our work and the youth we work with, they may escalate into a crisis and act out because they are working through trauma, learning to manage and communicate emotions properly, and overcoming backgrounds with which many adults would even struggle to cope.”

She said the agency had been working for months with Johnston police, the Iowa Department of Health and Human Services and others to address safety concerns, including leading an initiative with DHHS to find more funding for security measures for youth services organizations.

She said Ellipsis employees receive crisis intervention and de-escalation training and the facility has been considering options to increase safety and security on the small campus, which is tucked in a largely wooded residential area in Johnston. But she noted in her statement that the private agency does not run a youth detention facility or a jail.

“Our youth come to our facility on a court order most often because they don’t have a safe environment to stay in and need support,” she said. “We have a duty to serve.”

Koepplin also underscored something that other providers of group foster services in Iowa have said is a concern: Since at least 2017, she said, the DHHS has demanded in the agency’s contract that no child referred to the program be rejected or ejected.

That “No Reject, No Eject” policy meant Ellipsis, one of 17 providers of such care in the state, had no choice but to accept Mathis.

Other states allow youth care programs more discretion in whether they will accept certain youth, but those states’ policies also have been controversial because they’ve sometimes resulted in youths with behavior problems or mental illness being warehoused in hospitals, hotels and other inappropriate settings, triggering lawsuits.

Neither DHHS Director Kelly Garcia nor Janae Harvey, the agency’s family well-being and protection director, responded to requests for interviews. They also failed to answer questions regarding the agency’s handling of Galloway-Menke’s death, one of the worst tragedies involving a private youth worker in Iowa in recent history.

One of those questions: Whether the “no reject, no eject” policy is still considered prudent and necessary, after Galloway-Menke’s death and given the severity of behavior that private youth agencies have been reporting since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As the youth worker’s two adult daughters mull a possible wrongful death lawsuit, their lawyer, Trever Hook, has been examining the facts surrounding the death.

“It was a matter of time ― of when, not if ― that something like this was going to happen,” Hook said. “We’re looking at all sorts of angles to see what’s legally viable.”

Williamson contends there is much evidence Ellipsis and Iowa’s DHHS are ill-equipped to deal with the seriousness of what the staff and students faced there.

“There were a lot of scary behaviors, and violent threats made daily,” she said. “They just weren’t doing anything about it.”

65% spike in police calls in five years at Ellipsis in Johnston

Koepplin said a small number of youth are involved in most of the police calls at Ellipsis’ north-side residential facility but acknowleged behavior has worsened.

Johnston police reports show students, staff and police officers all have been injured while trying to deal with assaultive behavior.

Calls to police from Ellipsis, 7085 N.W. Beaver Drive, climbed from 314 in 2019 to 519 last year ― a 65% spike. Through May 31 this year, police were called 251 times ― about 50 times a month.

Incident reports that Watchdog obtained from Johnston police also verify Williamson’s claims that assaults were common: 22 were reported this year through the end of May.

According to the police report related to the shove that allegedly caused Galloway-Menke’s severe head injury, Mathis was accused of assaulting staff that day while running from the Ellipsis campus. Over an open phone line, police heard lots of screaming.

Hook said Galloway-Menke and a male staffer followed Mathis at a safe distance, as required by Ellipsis’ protocols. He said witnesses stated that a supervisor and other workers also went outside but stayed farther back. Finally, the teen turned and sprinted across a street, and shoved Galloway-Menke. Her head hit the concrete, and she died six days later after being taken off life support.

Mathis faces a count of second-degree murder. The Polk County Attorney’s Office is still deciding whether to charge him as an adult.

A 15-year-old matching Mathis’ description in terms of size, weight and race is mentioned in several Johnston police assault reports in the months prior to the attack, including one a week before Galloway-Menke was injured.

In one incident in March during which Williamson was working, the 15-year-old became so agitated after being pinned to the floor, handcuffed and held by his ankles that he threw up. Williamson said the incident severely injured a program director.

In another incident in March during which Williamson was working, it took eight staff members to hold down the student, who had to be taken to a “control room.”

“That was in my cottage and it was very bad,” Williamson said. “They had five male staff on (Mathis) and the cops came.”

She said the control room was concrete, and students would be held there for hours without access to an outside restroom. If they needed to go to the bathroom, she said, they were required to go on the floor and clean up their own waste when they left.

Koepplin said if de-escalation techniques do not work to calm youth and they and others are deemed at risk, then youth are moved to control rooms. When asked in an email, she did not address the reported absence of a toilet in those rooms.

Williamson said youth placed at Ellipsis’ Johnston campus tend to have a honeymoon period where they’re hoping to get released quickly by behaving. As time goes on, they can act out or become violent. She said she and her mother, both youth counselors, tried to be consistent with the kids they worked with because that was important in turning around behavior.

Williamson said Mathis was placed at Ellipsis in January and lived in the cottage where she worked. In March, the teen was transferred to a cottage where her mother worked. She said the teen often would erupt in a rage when told no or denied an MP4 player. The teen used the MP4 player to watch inappropriate videos, she said.

She said Mathis threatened to kill other students and staff repeatedly, and she had to make calls to Johnston police when Mathis’ behavior, or those of other residents, got out of hand.

She also said Mathis was transitioning from male to female, so it was uncomfortable when the teen was placed in her cottage with a male roommate. At her mother’s cottage, she said, all students had their own rooms and bathrooms.

Daughter felt so unsafe at Ellipsis that she quit

Williamson, who started at Ellipsis in August 2023, said she and her mother felt passionate about helping kids. But she said she felt so unsafe working at Ellipsis that she quit in mid-April this year, roughly a month before her mother was killed.

She said she was born with a deformity in her ribs and had a surgery in April 2023 that helped free up her heart and lungs so she could breathe. But that surgery left her with metal in her chest that made her vulnerable if she were attacked.

“The way Ellipsis operates, it’s heartbreaking,” she said. “There needs to be a change. This could have been prevented.”

Galloway-Menke’s death is the latest in a string of major crises hitting residential facilities serving youth in Iowa’s child-welfare and juvenile justice systems.

From the alleged inappropriate sexual relationship between a teacher and student that caused firings this year of top administrators at the State Training School at Eldora to the 16 rapes reported over the last six years at Boys Town in Omaha, Nebraska, which provides foster care to Iowa youth, homes that market themselves as safe havens for at-risk youth have failed repeatedly to keep their young charges and, sometimes, staff safe.

In a lawsuit filed last year, Disability Rights Iowa and other advocacy organizations accused Iowa of a “longstanding failure” to provide Medicaid-eligible children with legally required and medically necessary mental health and behavioral health services. The lawsuit alleged the state administered “an inadequate, inaccessible and dysfunctional mental health system” and said the serious mental health conditions faced by youth described in the suit are considered disabilities under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The groups settled the lawsuit later that year, promising changes.

Galloway-Menke died the same month that Gov. Kim Reynolds signed a bill into law that by July 2025 will overhaul the state’s disconnected mental health and substance abuse treatment system. But some critics in the Legislature complained the legislation ignored the state’s decades-long children’s mental health crisis, saying youth in the state desperately need more appropriate care.

Lee Rood’s Reader’s Watchdog column helps Iowans get answers and accountability from public officials, the justice system, businesses and nonprofits. Reach her at lrood@registermedia.com, at 515-284-8549, on Twitter at @leerood or on Facebook at Facebook.com/readerswatchdog.

This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Police calls had spiked 65% before Iowa youth home worker was killed