When Taylor Kiesel arrived at Change Academy at Lake of the Ozarks, a youth residential treatment center in Missouri, another student cautioned her.
"Welcome to hell," the kid said.
Kiesel, then 16, soon learned why. She and other former students said staff at the center, known as Calo, neglected and assaulted the children and teenagers whose developmental trauma they were tasked with healing.
Kiesel, then weighing just 110 pounds, said a male employee she described as "bulky" body-slammed her to the asphalt, leaving her with a black eye, a bloody nose and a concussion she said went untreated.
"It was a very, very violent place," Kiesel, who attended Calo in parts of 2022 and 2023, told The Midwest Newsroom. "There was constant chaos, constant pain, constant blood."
Now 20, Kiesel is one of 15 former residents who, since 2024, have filed lawsuits against Calo, alleging physical and emotional abuse by staff. Some former residents also allege sexual assaults by fellow students. The former residents, who ranged in age from 9 to 17 when they arrived at the facility in Lake Ozark, reported "prison-like" conditions where restraints turned into physical abuse, said Robert Thrasher, their Kansas City-based attorney.
Since opening in 2007, Calo's leadership has touted itself as the country's "first adoption-specific family treatment center." In a 2016 promotional video, Calo's then-CEO said the program's vision was "to become to childhood trauma what St. Jude is to childhood cancer."
But in the nearly two decades Calo has received children from across the country, Missouri's child welfare agency, the Department of Social Services, has documented five findings of physical abuse and five of sexual abuse involving Calo.
In a statement attributed to an unnamed spokesperson, Calo told The Midwest Newsroom the facility does not tolerate staff aggression and "categorically" denied all claims of abuse and neglect. The center called the lawsuits "without merit" and said they were filed by the same attorney.
"Calo Programs exist to serve the hardest-to-treat cases — the students and families the broader system has given up on," Calo said.
The 'troubled teen industry'
Calo is a licensed facility in Missouri, but does not currently hold a contract with the Children's Division, said Baylee Watts, a DSS spokesperson. On rare occasions, Missouri has placed children in its legal custody at the facility when "no other in-state providers have been available," Watts said.
Owned by Embark Behavioral Health, the for-profit center reports it treats developmental trauma, including from adoption, and attachment issues, among other conditions. Many residents are adoptees. Surrounded by woods on the waterfront, the facility says it uses golden retrievers to heal residents' trauma. The center is part of what observers broadly call the "troubled teen industry."
The lawsuits allege employees there were not only unqualified to work with the students, but that they threw them to the ground or against walls, denied them medical treatment for injuries, and rationed their food, or forced them to eat, to correct arbitrary "weight issues." Some were refused food or water "altogether," according to the civil petitions, the latest of which was filed in April.
The plaintiffs, whose cases are filed under pseudonyms, allege physical and emotional abuse dating back to 2014. The kids were sent to Calo from across the country, at times by a parent whose school districts referred them there. But Thrasher, the attorney, said the facility provided little to no schooling — a claim Calo called "patently false," saying it operates two fully accredited schools.
DSS has received more than 100 calls about the facility for a variety of issues, including claims of poor living conditions, Thrasher said. Records show that the Camden County Sheriff's Office has received at least 400 calls tied to Calo's address, including for reports of runaways, assaults and sexual abuse.
'Covered with bruises'
Lilo Baurer, then 15, awoke one night in 2017 to find their mother sobbing at their bedside in their northeastern Illinois home. There were three strangers standing by.
Baurer, who is nonbinary, was being "gooned." In the so-called troubled teen industry, the term describes the practice of a secure transport company, often hired by a teen's parent, taking a child to a boarding school or a treatment center. Baurer had heard horror stories about kids being thrown in vehicles and taken against their will. So when the transporters asked if Baurer wanted to go the "easy or hard way," they opted to go willingly.
Baurer had been through Missouri before, when their parents drove them home after adopting them as a baby in Arkansas.
After their father died of a brain aneurysm when they were 10, Baurer struggled with their mental health and self-harmed. They were sent to inpatient and outpatient facilities and a lockdown facility in Indiana.
Baurer found Calo to be the most physical of all these settings, as employees used restraints on students deemed dangerous to themselves or others. At times, staff used them for legitimate safety reasons. But on other occasions, Baurer said, kids were thrown to the ground and pinned by multiple employees for minor infractions, such as passing a note from the girls side of the campus to the boys side.
For Baurer, these restraints exacerbated the symptoms of their Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a connective tissue disorder.
"That happened to me so many times, being slammed to the ground," said Baurer, who attended Calo until late 2018. "You end up covered with bruises."
That year, a state caseworker learned a student suffered a compound fracture of a vertebra after an employee used a restraint on her, according to a sheriff's report. The student acknowledged she "swung at" the employee, and her injury was determined to be unintentional.
A few days after Taylor Kiesel arrived at Calo in 2022, her mother, Rachelle, received an email from the admissions coordinator saying new students sometimes try to scare their parents into removing them from treatment. Children want "Calo to become the bad guy," it read.
In the email, Calo said students might take a "grain of truth" and exaggerate it. It provided examples: "The staff beat up the students" and "My roommate is an aggressive, psychotic pervert."
"Jesus," Caleb Cunningham, Camden County's prosecutor from 2021 to 2023, said on CBS News as he read the letter, saying it appeared Calo wanted to "divide" the parent and child from the outset.
Allegations of sexual abuse
During Baurer's 16 months at Calo, they said they were sexually assaulted by another student while an employee was in another room.
Redacted records from the sheriff's office, spanning from 2014 to 2024, show at least eight reports of students claiming sexual abuse by other residents. Those included:
- In 2018, an 18-year-old student told a deputy he was being abused by other residents. He said he told staff but was not taken seriously. Calo's then-chief operating officer told the deputy it was the first time the allegations were disclosed to Calo and vowed to investigate. Calo had no record of this claim.
- In 2021, a mother in Chicago reported that her son, who is Black, experienced racial bullying by his peers and was inappropriately touched by another student. "No adults were in earshot or watching the boys," she wrote in a statement. Calo said there was no substance to the allegation, and no law enforcement action was taken.
- In 2024, a woman claimed Calo was "attempting to cover up" her 12-year-old daughter's sexual assault by another student — which, she alleged, occurred while an employee was on her phone. Staff did not notify her or the state about the incident, she said. She claimed Calo additionally failed to notify the family of another student assaulted there; that family also notified authorities. Calo said investigators did not substantiate their claims. In one case, Calo said a staffer failed to follow protocol and lost the report, which was later found. The employee "took accountability for their error in reporting late," Calo said.
In another 2024 report, a California woman said her son, 14, disclosed that another boy had been "raping him" since he arrived at Calo three months earlier. She was upset that no one at Calo called her. A deputy drove to Calo, where an employee said the Children's Division had been notified.
"I explained to him it was an issue a law enforcement agency was not contacted," the deputy, Sean Lackey, wrote in his report.
Lackey asked to see the victim, but the Calo employee denied him entry. Lackey said it was "non-negotiable," and the student was brought outside. Lackey spoke to him in his patrol car and was unable to determine if the sexual acts were consensual. Staff told Lackey written statements indicated they were consensual, but "those statements were never located," he wrote.
Calo said the sheriff's report appeared related to a time Calo called DSS after a student made a claim to staff. Calo said it is "standard practice" for state investigators to contact law enforcement, who usually arrive with a DSS representative.
"In this case, the officer arrived unannounced by himself in the evening when the campus was locked after business hours," a Calo spokesperson said.
Some of the former students represented by Thrasher's law firm, Monsees & Mayer, P.C., reported they were abused by other residents, Thrasher said.
The lawsuits contend employees knew of "multiple and continuing" instances of physical and sexual assaults, but did not take reasonable steps to stop them.
A former Calo supervisor said there weren't enough staffers to keep the kids safe. The supervisor, who spoke to The Midwest Newsroom on the condition of anonymity because she believes she signed a confidentiality agreement, said lack of sufficient supervision increased the opportunity for students to harm themselves or others.
"We never had enough staff and they knew that, but nothing was ever done," said the former employee, who called for more state oversight of Calo.
Calo denied the assertion and said its funders each year conduct multiple on-site visits, including "unannounced overnight visits."
"Calo operates under rigorous, continuous external oversight given the complexity of our population and the breadth of our funding sources, which span Medicaid, commercial insurance, adoption subsidy, school district funding and private pay," Calo told The Midwest Newsroom.
Christy Nelson, a special education teacher who quit her job at Calo, told the Associated Press that concerns she reported to lawmakers and regulators went nowhere.
"It was extremely dysfunctional, dangerous," Nelson told the AP, which found adoptees across the U.S. are now overrepresented in the industry.
None of the lawsuits allege sexual misconduct by staff. But CBS News reported four former employees were convicted of crimes committed while employed at Calo, which included "sexually assaulting" residents.
Calo said each employee passed background checks and noted one was charged with crimes unrelated to its clients while on leave. Of the other cases, Calo said, one was in 2009 and two were in 2017. Two cases involved criminal activity on company property.
"We currently employ over 275 people and over the course of 20 years, we have employed thousands," a Calo spokesperson said.
In 2021, a sheriff's report shows, a student said she was sexually assaulted on Calo's campus by a male employee. The employee said if she told anyone, he "would kill himself," she reported. Calo said the student made advances toward the staffer, who "rebuffed her," and that state investigators found her claims to be unsubstantiated.
One former student, who is not suing, ended up at Calo at age 14 after she was wrongly diagnosed with an attachment disorder more than a decade ago. The woman, who asked to remain anonymous, said male employees took her to a room and touched her inappropriately on numerous occasions.
The woman said she was also punched in the face by staff and yelled at by a therapist, who told her she'd end up as a sex worker.
"I was so traumatized," she said. The Midwest Newsroom does not typically name survivors of sexual assault without their permission.
Some of the alleged abuse never made it beyond Calo's investigation procedures once reported to staff, according to Thrasher, the plaintiffs' attorney.
Thrasher's firm — which has represented survivors of abusive Missouri boarding schools that have since closed — called into question the accuracy of reports written by Calo staff, saying they don't always match narratives from law enforcement or hospital personnel. Some students believe Calo "censored or manipulated" incident reports, he said.
"This is untrue," Calo responded. "Period. Full stop."
When an allegation is made, Calo said, it suspends the employee, preserves evidence, gathers and obtains statements, and contacts state investigators.
Calo provided a letter it said was from Camden County Sheriff Chris Edgar, in which he expressed support for Calo. Edgar's office did not return calls from The Midwest Newsroom. In an interview with the AP, Edgar painted a more complicated picture: Calo officials had prevented his deputies from "being able to investigate stuff," though he said the relationship had since improved.
A steep price
Paul DiIulio was desperate.
A business owner in New Hampshire, DiIulio and his wife adopted three of their five children, including a son who was abandoned in eastern Europe as a baby. He had been taken to an orphanage, where he was severely neglected.
Adopted when he was 5, the boy became a combative teenager. So in 2021, DiIulio sent his son to a wilderness program in Utah. Then he heard about Calo, which he recalled compared itself to St. Jude.
Calo came at a high price, so DiIulio refinanced apartment buildings he owned. He spent at least $150,000 to send his son there for 10 months in 2021 and 2022, he said.
Staff told DiIulio they were "slowly peeling away the onion" of his son's abandonment issues. DiIulio came to believe the employees, even if well-intentioned, were dishonest about his son's progress.
DiIulio pulled the plug. His son came home in worse shape, he said, and he felt he didn't get his money's worth. He left a review for Calo on Google, calling it "a scam."
"It saddens us that your son was not able to maintain his treatment gains outside the treatment environment," Calo responded, thanking him for the review. "We are always seeking feedback and learning ways we can improve how we serve our students and families."
"Desperate, moderately well-to-do parents who love their children will do anything to get their children back," he said. "And so I paid."
The price of sending a child there is underscored by lawsuits Calo filed this year against parents it says owe the company money. In one, Calo accused a woman in Johnson County, Kansas, of keeping her insurer's payouts of more than $206,000 that were meant for Calo. The center said she also owed about $8,900 in out-of-pocket expenses.
“Desperate, moderately well-to-do parents who love their children will do anything to get their children back. And so I paid.”
Some youth at Calo may be funded through Missouri's adoption subsidy program, said Watts, of DSS. In those cases, the choice of facility is made primarily by adoptive parents, not the state, she noted.
For the parents of Thrasher's clients, they "thought they were sending their child to one place, and the reality was much different," he said.
Other families had positive experiences with Calo, which said 79% of its clients complete the program. One father told the AP he thought the staff was made up of dedicated professionals "trying to do their best with about the toughest group of kids you could probably ever house."
'Support kids'
The Missouri Attorney General's Office is not investigating Calo, but said it welcomes reports from concerned Missourians.
Attorneys for survivors said Missouri could hold institutions accountable by extending the time allotted to sue them. Minors have until age 26 to sue an institution that facilitated their abuse.
"Once you start hitting corporations' bottom dollar and bottom line, those policies and procedures that are on paper that sometimes get ignored all of a sudden start being followed," said Kayla Onder, a St. Louis attorney who heads her firm's abuse litigation practice and is not involved in the cases against Calo.
Thrasher's firm has advocated for Missouri to pass a "window" law, as numerous other states have, to let survivors of any age sue within a two or three-year period.
Several former students said they hope to see Calo's doors close.
Taylor Kiesel, who runs an animal rescue in Washington state, said several years after leaving Calo, she still struggles to sleep through the night.
"It's going to affect me for the rest of my life," she said.
Now living in Iowa City, Lilo Baurer graduated last month with a bachelor's degree in social work from the University of Iowa, where they are now in a master's program. They plan to become a social worker for survivors of abuse, including ones harmed in the industry they were caught up in.
"We can support kids and their mental health," they said, "without ripping them from homes and labeling them 'troubled teens.'"
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