INDEPENDENCE, Iowa (KCRG) – Lora Smith clearly remembers June 15th, 2024.
She was working at the Independence Mental Health Institute, known as IMHI, helping deescalate a violent situation involving a 17 year old boy.
That’s when she was suddenly attacked.
“He literally just comes up and kneed me in my stomach as hard as he can.”
Smith was four months into a pregnancy she and her husband conceived through in vitro fertilization.
“Ultimately we lost our son.”
When we talked with Lora last year, she and two other women had just filed workers’ compensation claims against the state calling for changes.
Now they’re filing a lawsuit.
“We’re trying to shine a spotlight on a really dangerous situation for some of the state’s most courageous mental health care workers who continue to get beaten, and hair pulled, and brain injuries and PTSD and other conditions that are of a permanent nature that greatly affect their lives and put their co-workers at risk and they can’t take it any more and they have to leave the facility,” said Darin Luneckas, a Cedar Rapids attorney representing the women.
Lora, her two colleagues, and five other former IMHI workers are suing the state for willful and wanton disregard for employee safety after a “years-long pattern of repeated, escalating, and foreseeable patient assaults on employees”.
The suit alleges between January 1, 2023 and June 23, 2026, Buchanan County Sheriff’s deputies were called to IMHI 479 times.
Over those three and a half years, the suit says there were 133 assaults reported.
“These people will continue to get assaulted and severely injured on a permanent basis unless something changes at IMHI,” said Luneckas.
Luneckas says the suit was filed to put a spotlight on what they claim is a serious problem at the state-run facility.
IMHI treats both youth and adults suffering severe symptoms of mental illness.
It’s one of two institutes still operated by the state.
Health and Human Services says it offers the “least restrictive setting possible” to return its patients “to their communities as soon as possible”.
But the suit alleges it comes at the expense of the workers inside this building.
“Nurses should be caregivers, not gladiators,” said Robert Rehkemper, a West Des Moines attorney also representing the workers.
“What’s happening at this institution is that they’re sending them into the arena, getting them battered, bruised, bloodied, they come crawling out and Administration is saying ‘Get back in there’.”
In April of 2025 when we first ran our story, a spokesperson for the Iowa Department of Health and Human Services issued a statement saying “while we cannot comment on pending litigation, the safety of the patients we serve and the employees at our facilities is our top priority.”
The newly filed lawsuit names senior administrators at IMHI as well as the state and its Department of Health and Human Services.
“As great as our state is, we’re at the absolute bottom of our Nation when it comes to mental health services,” Rehkemper said.
“That should be an embarrassment to all of us.”
Lora and the other workers in the suit have since left IMHI, some leaving the nursing profession entirely.
But their attorneys say they hope the lawsuit will protect those workers still on the job.
“They don’t want to see these people left behind even further just because the state won’t step up and provide the necessary measures of security to maintain a workforce to do that great work,” said Luneckas.
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