After her family spirals, disabled daughter ends up furious, in misery

• Sarah Beaman, an intellectually and physically disabled woman, was removed from her family’s care after her parents were charged with neglect.
• Separated from her family, Beaman’s mental health spiraled, leading to violent outbursts in two different group homes.
• Beaman’s case highlights the difficulty in finding adequate care for Iowans with significant disabilities and behavioral challenges.

When the Beamans bottomed out: Fourth in a series.

MOUNT AYR ― Sarah Beaman ran the pizza cutter across the back of her hand. Sometimes pain calmed her and stopped her from hurting others.

In times like these, when the 33-year-old, intellectually disabled woman was anxious, upset or angry in the small group home in Mount Ayr, she was supposed to be able to call “Miss K,” the director, so her behavior wouldn’t escalate. That was part of her safety plan, something the group home staff were told she needed to calm her.

But on that Saturday, the day before Easter, Sarah complained, those working at the Circle of Life group home wouldn’t let her make the call.

Instead, they said she needed to get in a car so she could be driven to the Ringgold County Hospital. She was hurting herself and they feared she was suicidal.

Sarah hated hospitals and was terrified of being alone in them without her family. The group home staff had already told her, she said, that she might never see her parents again. She knew they could try to commit her to an institution. That’s what happens at hospitals.

“They would not leave me alone,” she said.

In another era, someone like Sarah with a low IQ, serious physical limitations and acute mental health and behavioral challenges, likely would have been placed for life in a state institution or county home, hidden from sight without an education, the opportunity to learn life skills or any hope of exercising free will.

The Americans with Disabilities Act, signed in 1990 by then-President George H.W. Bush, and a landmark 1999 U.S. Supreme Court decision ensured even people with significant disabilities had the right to receive state-funded services in their communities instead of institutions.

With the support of Social Security and Medicaid, the social income and insurance programs for disabled, low-income Americans, Sarah, along with her parents and three siblings, had been able to stay independent for more than three decades, despite many hardships, the loss of providers, poverty and a mix of mental and physical health struggles.

But the family’s situation grew dire last year after they crowded together in an uninhabitable house in Audubon with dog feces and urine throughout, a basement floor covered with human waste from a broken sewer line, and frequent outbreaks of domestic violence. The Audubon County attorney and a district court judge agreed Sarah’s disabled parents had neglected her in an increasingly chaotic household. Todd and Bonnie faced possible prison time for criminal dependent adult abuse and animal neglect. They pleaded not guilty.

While state and federal laws gave authorities the right to take custody of Sarah, they did nothing to ensure she’d be better off afterward.

In Iowa, finding a permanent home with skilled caregivers for anyone with her level of need has proved incredibly difficult, if not impossible, as providers, bed space and Medicaid coverage for such services have dwindled.

In Sarah’s case, a nine-month waiting game has proved incredibly traumatizing for her — and dangerous to others.

Separation, isolation leads to violence

Since authorities condemned last fall the house in Audubon where the Beaman family had been living, the Iowa Department of Health and Human Services and a state managed care contractor had moved Sarah from a hospital to two different group homes over seven months’ time, hoping to find her a better situation than she experienced with her family.

But separation from the people she had depended on her entire life caused Sarah to spiral, rebel and lash out violently.

In her first group home in Creston, she stabbed a staff member with a fork, tried to jump from a moving car and injured a law enforcement officer.

Christopher Swensen, the Audubon County attorney, moved to have a judge cut off her communication with her siblings after she’d already been restrained from communicating with her parents, alleging her sister and two brothers, who also had intellectual impairments, encouraged her to harm herself and others as a “means to disrupt placement.”

But Steven, Sarah’s brother, said Swensen’s action to cut them off from Sarah came after he made a formal complaint to the state about how she was being treated in the group home. Sarah, he said, had sent him photos of bruises and alleged in a Facebook posting that she was being harmed. He filed a complaint with the Iowa Department of Inspections, Appeals and Licensing, writing: “She is being treated like a caged animal.”

The group home staff took away all her electronic devices, court records show.

Sarah tried to tell anyone who would listen that her family was all she had. She was miserable, angry and isolated from the only people who knew her and could help her feel secure. She complained some staff in the group homes were mean and made fun of her. Others provoked her rather than calmed her, she said.

“I cried so much, I don’t think I had any tears left,” she said.

A night in jail

On the Saturday before Easter, Sarah’s frustration with her second group home in Mount Ayr boiled over.

Fearing being forced to go to the hospital, she took a pair of scissors from a desk and allegedly threatened her roommate, telling the group home staff she wasn’t going. Authorities alleged Sarah barricaded herself in the room and the “staff could not control her or calm her down,” court records show.

The outburst landed Sarah in the Ringgold County Jail, accused of domestic abuse. In one afternoon, she went from someone the state had deemed in need of protection to an accused assailant.

It also triggered another difficult hunt for a place to house a complex young woman with an explosive personality disorder, cerebral palsy, narcolepsy and major depression. Someone who could suddenly collapse and not come to for as long as 20 minutes. Someone who could be sweet, resourceful and determined, but emotional, impetuous and violent when she didn’t get her way.

Some of those who weighed in on the guardianship case in April court hearings had never talked to Sarah. But Sarah’s attorney Bill Early had, and he warned the others something the Beaman family knew well: Sarah was, in many ways, smarter than others gave her credit for and incredibly willful when she wanted to be.

“Quite honestly,” Early said, “she’s in a position to poison any placement she doesn’t want to be in.”

In the group homes, Sarah also had been taken off medications that helped her manage her narcoleptic “spells” and regulate her behavior. She’d been prescribed a powerful drug, Haldol, an antipsychotic prescribed for schizophrenia, that came with a black-box warning. She’d gained a lot of weight on the drug and she said it left her exhausted, especially in the morning. That was the anxious, tired state she was in on the Saturday of Easter weekend.

After being taken by deputies to jail that morning, Sarah had a panic attack, a feeling she’d had many times before, like she couldn’t breathe. But she said a jailer there was kind and told her she was safe. At least there, she said, she got good sleep.

“I slept better in jail than I ever did in the group home,” she said.

Free falling

With their first born yanked from their lives, Bonnie and Todd were in a free fall. Their mental and physical health deteriorated. Todd, in congestive heart and kidney failure, was hospitalized in March and deteriorated more in April.

Unable to pool their family’s Social Security and Medicaid any longer, the Beamans also were poorer. Living on less than $15,000 annually, they stretched what they had, making the rounds at central Iowa food banks as often as they could. Twice a week, the Beamans drove their van to Des Moines so Bonnie and son Steven could make money selling plasma.

The costs to the state of the Beamans’ problems also mounted. Among them: courts were handling 11 different cases, all involving lawyers paid for by the state. There had been jail time, mandatory psych evaluations and a hired court visitor, an attorney who worked by the hour. Group home care for someone with Sarah’s acute needs can cost as much as $260,000 annually, figures obtained from the state show, and now people believed she needed an even higher level of 24-7 care.

After her release from jail, the woman Sarah’s family wanted to be her new guardian, her aunt Kristi Beaman, placed her temporarily in the Guthrie Center home of Beverly Wild, an elderly, disabled attorney who had helped the Beamans with their guardianship of Sarah and her brother Steven. Wild had previously tried but failed to persuade a judge to let Sarah Beaman go back home with her parents to Menlo.

Wild lived with Kelly Bast, a retired physician, who also strongly believed the best placement for Sarah was with her family.

The temporary living situation for Sarah at the home did not sit well with most others involved in the case, including Swensen, who wanted to quickly move her, believing the arrangement was highly dangerous for them all.

“Sarah Beaman has a history of violent behavior including multiple instances of physically attacking and injuring facility staff. She also has a history of physically assaulting law enforcement personnel,” Swensen wrote in a court motion.

The decision angered Donna Bothwell, a judge temporarily involved in the case, who said the guardian should never have moved Sarah to Wild’s home without court consent. The judge called it “completely unethical” for Wild to take Sarah into her home because she had been the attorney representing the parents accused of neglecting her. But the Beamans were no longer Sarah’s guardians.

In a phone hearing to weigh Sarah’s next placement, Early, her attorney, cautioned the judge not to be too harsh, warning any other placement would likely end in disaster, too.

“I don’t think you’re going to find a group home that is going to take her at this point because of her conduct,” Early said. “I would urge caution on the court… because the hornet’s nest is about to be struck.”

She helps find her own solution, then sabotages it

Where the Beamans lived, word had long since trickled out about a hard-luck family that had been living a house with a basement full of sewage and filled with malnourished dogs ― a home so filthy, it was immediately condemned.

“It was terribly sad to hear some of these details,” Audubon Mayor Palle Lansman said. “These were people who needed help. They were in a scenario well beyond what we typically see in a small town.”

People involved in Sarah’s case felt the same. But help in the form the Beamans needed never came.

Instead, yet another judge, Jennifer Benson Bahr, was asked to decide Sarah’s fate.

The temporary housing options discussed after the domestic abuse arrest were typical of those for others across the state with mental health issues, disabilities and serious behavior problems: a hospital, a shelter or a crisis stabilization center.

Some, including Swensen, the county attorney, felt Sarah needed a locked facility. But no placement was available and a representative from Molina Healthcare Iowa, the for-profit, managed-care business handling the case for the Iowa’s privatized Medicaid system, warned the judge no community placements in Iowa, like group homes, are locked.

Listening to others discuss her in phone calls, Sarah knew what was coming would not be good.

Using Bast’s cell phone, she did her own research and found a host home in Ankeny. She called and asked if those who ran it would talk to her guardian. The couple seemed perfect: The host woman used to be a teacher who worked with people with disabilities. The husband was a life coach. Both had lived and worked with people with violent behaviors.

“I really want to go to a host home,” Sarah later told Bahr in a phone hearing. “My old group homes provoke me.”

But before that placement option could be examined, Sarah would sabotage herself ― lashing out this time at her advocates: Bast, Wild and her aunt.

On April 22, Beaman became increasingly angry when she could not use Bast’s phone, trying to contact her family. She eventually screamed at Bast, storming away from him and telling him not to follow her. Deputies were called.

Later, her aunt Kristi called the home in Guthrie Center from Des Moines to try to help Sarah calm down.

Sarah exploded again, punched a wall and started throwing things at Bast. Then she threatened him with a kitchen knife.

Violating the judge’s no-contact order, they had to call Bonnie to calm Sarah down. They also called Guthrie County sheriff’s deputies for assistance.

Bast, Wild, Kristi Beaman and deputies tried to figure out what to do next. They learned Woodward Resource Center, one of the only state-run facilities still operating in Iowa, no longer took acute patients. An emergency room, they were told, might only hold her for about four hours.

In an emergency phone hearing the next day with Bahr, Bast was forced to admit he no longer felt safe caring for Sarah in his home. Kristi Beaman said her niece needed immediate removal to protect Bast and Wild, but she said she had called around and knew of no permanent placements that would take her. She said a hospital could take Sarah in the short term.

She also told Bahr she no longer wanted to be Sarah’s guardian.

“Unfortunately, unless there’s someone who wants to replace you, we can’t allow you to simply withdraw,” the judge said.

With no permanent housing options on the horizon and no way of protecting themselves from another violent outburst, Bast and Wild lacked a way to get Sarah that day to the county courthouse to start work on an involuntary commitment or hospitalization.

Sarah said that day she felt abandoned by others, including her aunt.

“I don’t know why you guys are punishing me,” she said in the phone hearing with the judge. “I got taken from my family.”

“You’re not being punished,” Bahr told her.

Bahr made clear on that call, and in a subsequent court order, that her legal powers in the guardianship case were limited. She could not write a court order demanding an involuntarily commitment or hospitalization.

“The court,” she wrote in her order, is not “Sarah’s day-to-day caregiver, treatment provider, case manager, insurer or placement coordinator. The Court does not control hospital admission decisions. This Court cannot simply pick a facility and order that the facility accept Sarah, particularly where admission may depend on provider acceptance, bed availability, clinical judgment, insurance authorization or separate statutory procedures.”

Bast wondered how he would make it through the night with Sarah so on edge.

Not long after the call with the judge ended, Sarah erupted again in anger. She eventually stormed out of the Guthrie Center home, screaming at Bast not to follow her.

Bast waited a bit and went looking ― and couldn’t find her.

But her family knew where she’d gone.

Eventually, Bast found her a block away at the Guthrie County Hospital being led down a long hallway for yet another mental health exam.

Sarah had done what she feared most: Voluntarily checked herself into the hospital alone.

After eight months, still no permanent home

By June — nine months after Sarah was taken from her parents’ for alleged neglect — a permanent placement for her still hadn’t been found.

After eloping twice from the Guthrie County hospital, while trying to get in touch with her family, she was moved to the Independence Mental Health Institute in Buchanan County. The institution is intended for short-term stays for people with severe symptoms of mental illness.

The whole time Sarah was out of her parents’ care, DHHS left her brother Steven, also considered a dependent adult, in the care of Todd and Bonnie. He did what he could to help his parents as they struggled without Sarah, and he feared being taken from his family, too.

Sibling Rex also rejoined the family in Menlo after his release from jail.

As they awaited trials that got repeatedly delayed, Todd and Bonnie said they took classes to try to prove they were neither unsafe nor criminally abusive. They also said they sought therapy.

“But it’s hard to find therapy out here when you only have Medicaid,” Bonnie said. “I only have Medicaid and a lot of providers won’t take that.”

An attorney for DHHS filed a complaint against Beverly Wild, the attorney who represented the Beamans and who, with Bast, took Sarah in for a short time. The complaint with the state’s Attorney Disciplinary Board stemmed from earlier accusation Wild crossed ethical boundaries by allowing her clients’ daughter to live with her without a judge’s approval while her guardianship case was ongoing.

Wild and Bast maintained that the state’s actions in Sarah’s case did far more harm than good. They still believe Sarah’s only hope of a stable placement is with the family that knew how to handle her — if only they could have some help.

Lacking providers and skilled caregivers, more people with disabilities nationally are going without. Around 700,000 people with disabilities already were on waiting lists for programs and services across the country in 2025 before decade-long historic cuts to Medicaid began. Individuals with intellectual disabilities in Iowa already on a wait list for services increased more than 334% since Medicaid was privatized, to 8,046 in January 2026 from 1,852 in 2016, records obtained from Iowa’s Department of Health and Human Services show. For some with acute needs like Iowan Sarah Beaman, jails and hospitals become solutions of last resort.

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.