By: Clark Kauffman
Over the past 12 months, Martell Guider, a 36-year-old male certified nursing assistant, has been the subject of complaints regarding a series of alleged incidents involving sexual impropriety at three Iowa nursing homes located in Audubon, Correctionville and Kalona.
The most recent case, and the only one in which criminal charges have been filed, involves Guider’s employment at the Pleasantview Home in Kalona.
According to police and prosecutors, officials at Pleasantview confronted Guider sometime in January after multiple employees raised concerns that he was being inappropriate with a minor who was present at the home but not a resident.
Police allege that after his supervisors talked to him about the complaints, Guider sent explicit photos of the minor to his employer.
According to the police reports, Guider’s colleagues at Pleasantview also complained that he had been making unwanted advances toward female co-workers in the nursing home. He was then barred from the care facility, according to police.
Guider is now charged with sexual exploitation of a minor by causing the minor to engage in a sex act; sexual exploitation through the use of photographs; possession of material depicting a minor engaged in sex; and first-degree harassment. He has yet to enter a plea in the case. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for April 9.
Court records show that at the time of his arrest, Guider was employed through Shiftkey, a temp agency that provides workers for health care facilities.
Prior to his arrest in the Pleasantview case, Guider was fired from two other Iowa nursing homes amid allegations of sexual impropriety.
The first of those cases dates back to April 2023, when a female caregiver at Audubon’s Friendship Home filed a complaint with the Iowa Department of Inspections, Appeals and Licensing about Guider’s behavior.
Six months later, Guider was working at Correctionville Specialty Care when he was the target of a complaint that he had raped a resident of the home. According to state inspectors, the alleged rape victim is not cognitively impaired.
After the woman reported the alleged rape, officials at Correctionville Specialty Care evicted the woman from the facility and dropped her off at a homeless shelter, according to state inspectors. Guider was terminated from employment at the Correctionville home, but state inspectors say the facility’s parent company, Care Initiatives of West Des Moines, continued to provide work for him in other Iowa nursing homes that it operates.
No charges were filed in either the Correctionville case or the Audubon case.
Audubon police have acknowledged they fielded at least two complaints about Guider’s conduct at Friendship Home but didn’t pursue the matter.
Audubon Police Chief Coby Gust said the complainants provided text messages and photos and expressed concern that the man’s behavior could spill over into his interactions with vulnerable residents, Gust said.
“It kind of just fell off the radar as far as anything being pursued,” Gust told Iowa Capital Dispatch, adding that after Guider’s employment at Friendship Home ended, he seemed to “disappear.” Gust added that his department recently shared information on the Audubon case with the authorities investigating the alleged Correctionville rape.
According to the complainant in the Friendship Home case, officials at the Iowa Department of Inspections and Appeals rejected her complaint about Guider last April, allegedly telling her the issues she raised were best addressed by management at the home since they involved worker-to-worker conduct that had no actual or potential impact on residents.
When asked about that, DIAL spokeswoman Diane McCool said the agency “cannot comment on whether information was received regarding a particular individual.”
After receiving that response from DIAL, the Iowa Capital Dispatch asked the complainant – who declined to be identified for this article – to contact DIAL again and ask for a status update on her April 2023 complaint.
The complainant said she did so and spoke to a supervisor who reiterated that unless a resident was captured on screen in the video where care was being delivered, the complaint amounted to worker-to-worker conduct that DIAL could not investigate.
She said the DIAL supervisor also refused to provide her with a copy of her own complaint, which she had submitted on a web-based form.
The complainant has provided the Capital Dispatch with screenshots of Guider’s alleged text messages, which include two photos of a man’s genitals and two photos of a man holding a bottle of Crown Royal inside a vehicle.
Guider has not responded to numerous calls and text messages from Iowa Capital Dispatch over the past several weeks.
State records show Guider was working for Pete Howe Sanitation in 2017, when he was fired for keeping a bottle of Crown Royal in his work vehicle. Several months later, in May 2018, he was certified as a nursing assistant and was cleared by the Iowa Department of Health and Human Services to work in care facilities.
