LOCKHART, Texas -- The scars from the tragedies experienced as a child and teenager have mostly healed for Robert Ellis; for the last 30 years he’s been helping others to do the same.
- Robert Ellis was abused by mother and her husband in his youth
- Later adopted by another family
- Now works with juvenile sex offenders
Robert Ellis wasn’t always an Ellis. He remembers meeting Carl Ellis at school at age 12, eventually becoming a regular at the Ellis house, running away from abuse at his own home.
“I mean I was beaten and abused and neglected,” said Ellis. “He broke my back when I was 8.”
Years of abuse at the hands of his biological mother and her husband led to multiple attempts to get the Ellis family to adopt him. Ellis's biological mother and her husband continually fought every attempt he made to get away from them, eventually filing for adult adoption at age 18. Even then, his ex-parents fought it, and that’s when both mothers would finally meet.
“My biological mother and her husband decided to beat the hell out of me in front of the Ellis’s house,” recalled Ellis. ”So I ran and ran through the front door, ran out the back, screamed to my parents - my stepparents - and my mother met my biological mother at the door with a .38 in her hand and said, 'You’re not hurting this boy anymore. That’s it, done.' And so I didn’t hear from them for years.”
A banner hands at Pegasus Schools in Lockhart, Texas, in this image from February 2020. (Matthew Mershon/Spectrum News)
While Ellis has been able to overcome most the abuse he dealt with, he said: “The sexual abuse, that was harder to deal with. It leaves more lingering scars, you know, mentally leaves a scar. Physically, the broken back healed, the broken legs and broken arms and all that - they all healed to a certain degree. But - and I’m not saying I’m sitting around obsessed with the sexual abuse either - I mean, I’ve overcome it. And that’s what I see is helping these kids overcome the same thing.”
Thirty years ago he would get the opportunity to create a space for kids who had gone through the same things he had. After several years of working with children at Darden Hill, Ellis said “it just got in my blood.”
Today, on more than 100 acres south of Lockhart, the Pegasus Schools Residential Treatment Center provides services for nearly 170 juvenile sex offenders between the ages of 10 and 17.
“It’s handed down generationally - these kids didn’t come up with it on their own,” said Ellis. “The incidents of them being - or the number of times - you know, it’s just incredible. People who don’t deal with this on a daily basis find it hard to believe, but it’s true.”
Ellis now works with his brother Carl and dozens of others to help break the cycle of abuse. Over the years, they’ve helped do that for nearly 5,000 kids from across Texas. Pegasus kids are provided with an education at a charter school on campus. Ellis said the schedule is pretty similar to that of a middle-school or high-school student, but after school is daily counseling.
“It’s case by case - every single of them is,” said Ellis. “Usually it takes about 12 months to get through the four stages. And of course the fourth being the reintegration stage, where you really start making the strides with the families and maybe the victim who’s in that family.”
Pegasus wasn’t always well received by the community, with concerns about having juvenile sex offenders nearby. But Ellis said that perception was turned around in time with the countless community service done by Pegasus kids.
It isn’t all serious - there’s basketball, an aquatics center, a ropes course, even a mini-golf course that was built by Ellis and the kids. They could be helping more kids at Pegasus - the capacity is 200 boys, but Ellis keeps the number of program participants around 170 due to the availability of staff.
“The employee pool in Lockhart is not that large, and we long ago being here 30 years - you know, we’ve used up every viable candidate there was in Lockhart,” said Ellis. "So now we’re drawing out of San Marcos, especially Texas State. There are several professors in the juvenile justice department over there who bring the students out, and then some of them end up going to work here, some of them end up being interns.”
According to Ellis, Pegasus operates at about an 85 percent success rate, with success equated with the number of kids being moved on to a better situation. Many who have been able to turn it around credit Pegasus and Ellis with making that happen. Several program graduates have let Ellis know how much he meant to them through phone calls and emails - however, one email in particular sticks out.
“He told me how proud he was of Pegasus and all that and at the end he said, 'by the way, my name is no longer 'X,' I changed my name to Robert,” recalled Ellis.
Ellis never realized the impact he had on that particular kid, but that fact that the former Pegasus student wanted to have the same name as him - it made him extremely emotional.
“Man, you talk about tears just going - you know, wow.”
Pegasus Schools staff works with juveniles in Lockhart, Texas, in this image from February 2020. (Matthew Mershon/Spectrum News)