He wears bluejeans, cowboy boots, and a name tag pinned like a badge to his red shirt. His backpack contains a jelly sandwich, a Cherry Coke and a comforting pastry treat called a Duchess Honey Bun. The Route 1 bus receives him, then resumes its herky-jerky journey through the northeastern Iowa city of Waterloo, population 68, He stares into the panoramic blur of ordinary life that was once so foreign to him.
For more than 30 years, he and a few dozen other men with intellectual disabilities β affecting their reasoning and learning β lived in a dot of a place called Atalissa, about miles south of here. For more than 30 years. Increasingly neglected and abused, the men remained in heartland servitude for most of their adult lives. This Dickensian story β told here through court records, internal documents and extensive first-time interviews with several of the men β is little known beyond Iowa.
But five years after their rescue, it continues to resound in halls of power. Overall, the Atalissa case has been a catalyst for change, according to Senator Tom Harkin , Democrat of Iowa, a longtime champion of people with disabilities, who still struggles with what these vulnerable men endured in his home state.
The dark tale of Mr. About what is noticed, what is not and what remains in need of constant vigilance. This Waterloo bus does not go to Atalissa. But the man in cowboy boots, rocking to its gentle sway, needs only to notice that telltale scar on his wrist, and he is instantly returned.
A veteran social worker named Denise Gonzales drove past the winter-quiescent fields of to some town called Atalissa. She had to see for herself what subordinates were telling her. She pulled uphill to an old schoolhouse, its turquoise exterior garish amid the sleeping acres of snow-dusted brown. She found an open door and stepped into a wonderland nightmare, with walls painted playhouse colors, floors speckled with roaches and the air rank with neglect. A few hands looked almost forked.
