CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — A longtime juvenile parole officer charged last week with sending a sexually explicit photo to a child has been fired for a second time.
Jason Ellis was fired Thursday, eight days after his arrest and 2½ years after being placed on suspension. He previously was dismissed in January 2017 but was reinstated after an appeal. And he also is named in a lawsuit alleging abuse at the state-run youth detention center, where he held both full- and part-time positions.
According to an FBI affidavit, Ellis sent online messages in 2020 and 2021 to undercover investigators posing as a 13-year-old girl and her father. Investigators say he expressed interest in having sex with the girl and sent her an explicit photo in February 2021.
Ellis appeared briefly in federal court Wednesday, where he waived his right to a detention hearing. His court-appointed attorney did not respond to a request for comment.
Ellis began his state employment in 2003 as a counselor at the Youth Development Center in Manchester. In 2005, he became a juvenile probation and parole officer, while also working part-time at the youth center from 2011-2012.
In 2017, he was fired over allegations that he used his state computer for personal email and spent “an inordinate amount of time on the internet for personal reasons,” according to the state personnel appeals board. In particular, his supervisors expressed concern about an email in which he reached out to a police officer about a relative’s arrest in another jurisdiction and a second email in which he forwarded a recipe for marijuana-laced cookies.
The appeals board, however, concluded that Ellis acted professionally in inquiring about whether it would be appropriate to contact the arresting officer. And it said Ellis’ explanation that he was just trying to keep up on the latest ways that juveniles use marijuana was reasonable.
According to the board’s decision, Ellis had received satisfactory annual performance reviews and had never before been disciplined at work.
“I beg of you and ask for mercy. This is all I know. I love working for this state and I can’t see myself doing anything else,” he wrote in an email to a supervisor shortly before his 2017 dismissal.
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services confirmed Ellis’ employment history but declined to comment on why he was suspended 2½ years ago. But the timing coincides with the launching of a broad criminal investigation into the Youth Development Center, now called the Sununu Youth Services Center.
Eleven former workers were arrested in April, and nearly 450 former residents have sued the state based on allegations involving more than 150 staffers from 1963 to 2018.
Most of the lawsuits are nearly identical and include few specifics other than the timeframe of the alleged abuse and the names of those accused. One of them accuses Ellis and another former employee of unspecified abuse involving a teenage boy between 2003 and 2006. They are not formal defendants in the case, however, but rather are identified within the lawsuit.
Ellis is not the only former staffer who was fired and re-hired. Bradley Asbury, who has been charged with holding down a teenage boy during a rape at the detention center in 1997 or 1998, had been fired over allegations of physical and psychological abuse but got his job back under an agreement that kept his termination out of his personnel file.
from Boston News, Weather, Sports | WHDH 7News
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