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Katie Koch, on the left, and Joel Manke, on the right, positioned in front of a photo of their home’s boarded-up window in Wisconsin, July 2023. (Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office; Image via WISN)
Joel Manke, involved in a harrowing child neglect case, admitted guilt and was sentenced on Monday for his part in allowing two children to live in squalor. The 40-year-old shares the same sentence as his partner, Katie Koch, 36: a decade in prison followed by another decade under supervised release.
He confessed to two charges of continual neglect of a child resulting in emotional harm, while the court dropped two charges of false imprisonment.
Koch pleaded guilty to two counts of chronic neglect of a child (consequence is emotional damage), and one count of false imprisonment. The court dismissed one count of false imprisonment, and two counts of neglecting a child (specified harm did not occur). As previously reported, cops in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, said they got 911 calls about two boys, ages 7 and 9, running naked through the street. They were covered in blood, feces, bruises, and red marks.
A caller told police a woman “yanked” one of the boys back inside.
“I’m not going to ever forget the way they looked when they came running out of that house — never forget that,” neighbor Chris Eder, who called 911, told Milwaukee ABC affiliate WISN in a July 2023 report. “The look on their faces was pure bewilderment. They were just looking all around. They could not — I don’t think they’d ever been outside before.”
Koch walked a police officer through her home. There was filth smeared all over the walls of the children’s bedroom, and the mother tried to play it off as “clay, paint, and chocolate,” but the officer noted that it was actually feces. The room, he said, smelled of feces and urine.
He described trash and garbage piling on the kitchen, and there was a mound of garbage outside the children’s room.
Five neighbors are cited in the complaint, identified by their initials, and described various information about the children.
One neighbor told police that one of the naked boys had been wandering down the sidewalk like a “caveman.” Another neighbor said they witnessed one of the children escaping through the broken bedroom window, then standing on top of an AC unit, and finally, but unsuccessfully, trying to climb a fence. Yet another neighbor said they hadn’t seen the children leave the house in some three years.
“It’s really terrible; it’s like something out of a horror movie,” Milwaukee County Assistant District Attorney Mallory Davis said in court at the time “The children were essentially confined to their room for much of their lives. And the door had a latch on the outside and the windows were boarded shut. I have finally been able to view videos and photographs of the home and I can tell you that almost every inch of their walls was covered in human feces.”
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