When I lived in Ohio, and I don’t remember where I learned this, the poorest county in the state was always said to be Vinton, and sometimes Meigs, both in the southeast part of the state. Both rural, both coal country, both sad, sad Appalachia. If you grew up in either one, you either got out or you stayed and grew weed.
I’ve since learned that I’m wrong, that the poorest counties are Adams, Pike, Scioto and yes, Meigs. You can look at this data in either map or table form, but I prefer the map. You can see where it concentrates — along the Ohio River and in the Mahoning Valley, up in what used to be steel country.
Anyway, long way around to a story that may have crossed your radar, probably fated to go wide based on heinousness alone, a case of 16 abused children found in a single squalid Vinton County house, attended by four adults. I’m sure every editor found the mugshots irresistible:
I’m paywalled out of the Columbus Dispatch, so I have to rely on shitty TV-newsroom coverage, but here we are:
All of the children, who range in age from 1.5 to 18 years old, are being medically evaluated. Wilson said several of the children are in serious condition and two had to be flown to hospitals due to the severity of their conditions. Seven of the children were taken to hospitals in Columbus.
“This is pure evil,” Wilson said during the press conference.
He added that they were living in “deplorable conditions” and that it was one of the worst environments he has seen in his career. During an update on Wednesday, Cain said the county keeps its livestock in better living conditions than what the children were living in. He said there was a high presence of bacteria and human feces.
Cain said the kids were living in what he believes was a 12×12 area of the residence.
Wilson said the children are all safe now, but one was placed in an intensive care unit and intubated at one point. Wilson said he believes that if authorities waited another 24 hours, there may have been multiple deaths.
Wilson is the new acting attorney general, and he’s got the patter down, for sure. “Pure evil” is prosecutor talk, but it’s hard — for me, anyway — to look at those four faces and see evil. They are said to be the parents and grandparents of the brood, but more details are hard to come by. Evidently the younger woman birthed 16 actual children, or maybe she didn’t, before anyone noticed. Noticed anything. How does this happen? The family had moved several times, but they’d been in Vinton County for four years. At least two of the children were younger than four.
I don’t see evil. I see mental illness, probably some dementia issues and certainly poverty. Poverty, the fertile ground from which ignorance grows, although I’ve known some whip-smart poor people in my time. Generational poverty, that’s the real killer. I cannot look at the woman on the far right and not think: IQ of 90, tops, probably abused as a child, certainly abused by her husband, man hands on misery to man, that’s the way the world goes.
I recall a line I ran across in a news story once: “pity house,” a social worker’s term for places like this. Pity houses become horror houses. I’m sure Jeff Gill has some thoughts about it. Also, the grandma? She’s a year younger than me.
So, moving on. What’s ICE up to these days? Snatching nuns, in their habits, off the street, that’s what. She was freed after the usual “bipartisan outrage,” but still. “The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for comment about her immigration status.” You don’t say.
Finally, I don’t know how I missed this earlier, a piece on the generation gap around location-sharing. I do not share location, except perhaps when trying to find someone in a crowded environment, like a street festival. I’m amazed at how younger people think it’s no biggie, but then again, I am Old.
OK, then. Time to head into the weekend. Enjoy yours. Let’s hope it cools down a bit for our nation’s big 2-5-0.
gretchen said on July 3, 2026 at 12:55 am
The younger woman was 15 when she gave birth to the first child, 2 months after she married an 18 year old. She went on to give birth nearly every year until now, 18 years later, including 2 sets of twins. She is now 33 years old. So if we are going to treat the older kids as victims of child abuse, that woman is a victim of child abuse also.
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Dorothy said on July 3, 2026 at 5:57 am
This story is stomach churning and nightmare inducing. When we saw the first report on the news the man speaking said he could not get the smell out of his head, that he was smelling it at that moment while he was speaking into a microphone, a day after he’d been in the house. The oldest child could not spell his own name (I think the child is male but I’m not 100% sure). They have to be feral, 16 kids in one 12’ x 12’ room. I want to know who reported them and brought authorities to the house.
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David Cook said on July 3, 2026 at 6:40 am
The younger kids at least have a chance if you believe in nurture over nature. For the most part, I do. The older ones are going to have a really tough row to hoe. I doubt they’ll get anywhere near the support they’ll need and deserve once it’s out of the deadlines.
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Jeff Gill said on July 3, 2026 at 7:14 am
The only thing I’m picking up in my channels right now is the use of cages. Which in Ohio child welfare horror stories isn’t even original. But I know caseworkers and police are very shocked by enclosures and pens and kennels when used with kids.
Apparently the younger adult male was charged with public indecency, which is how officials of some sort ended up at the door. The smells led to further review; you’d be surprised how hard it is to get past the front door if the occupant is a legal tenant let alone owner, and refuses entry to even a uniformed officer. It can’t be a bench warrant alone for him not showing up. I’m sure we’ll learn more.
I will spare you all from war-storying a number of times I got inside of squalor and decay and outside couldn’t get children services engaged. It’s a hard set of specifications to meet even when common sense says “this can’t be acceptable.” But the scale of this case is pretty shocking; the older couple has to be key to maintaining official invisibility for 18 some years. But these cases are where I most regret the general abandonment of truancy as a juvenile category, just because following up on a kid vanishing from public radar by way of school attendance is often the only way you keep these cases from happening in isolation, with just one or two kids. How you manage to pen up and yet still keep alive more than a dozen is a perverse achievement that has no parallel I can think of, and I wish I can’t think of as many as I do.
Gretchen is of course quite correct. That’s the keystone in this case of child abuse over at least a generation. But generational child abuse is not the original part of this case. Just the scale.
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nancy said on July 3, 2026 at 7:23 am
I wondered if she was doing home births, but then saw the twins detail, which I assume means she must have been delivering in a hospital. Those folks are pretty sharp at spotting bad home situations, even in Medicaid cases. Dunno what went wrong here.
The eldest child is said to have special needs/developmental issues.
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Deborah said on July 3, 2026 at 9:18 am
I had an experience walking into a place where people were living in squalor and it has stayed with me. I was looking for a house to move into in St. Louis, we (my now ex and I) wanted a cool old house then. There was a wonderful part of town called Lafayette Square (I may be misremembering the name) that had wonderful, big, old and rundown houses. The real estate agent took me to one of those inhabited by squatters and lordy that was horrible. The squatters were in the house asleep while we were there and a little kid, maybe 5 came to the door, he was barely verbal, wearing no pants and a dirty shirt, he was filthy. There was an old couple sleeping in a bed in the kitchen and about 6 adults were sleeping here and there on chairs or the floor. It was terribly sad. I can’t get that out of my mind. Eventually someone bought that house and fixed it all up, I always wondered what happened to that little kid, he’d be in his early 50s now.
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Julie Robinson said on July 3, 2026 at 9:33 am
This breaks my mama heart. What chances do these kids have of normalcy? I know two families who adopted from Russian orphanages, two and three siblings respectively. Despite years of intensive interventions, none of the five became functioning adults but devolved into drugs, sex work, or criminal activity.
None of them ever learned trust. No amount of love could overcome those lost critical development periods. Presumably the adults also didn’t achieve basic emotional maturity.
Damn, damn, damn.
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Mark P said on July 3, 2026 at 11:35 am
Funny how shit grows through the generations. My late uncle gave everything to his son, including a house. His son doesn’t pay his taxes or utility bills, and mooches hundreds of dollars from my aunt, who is 87 and in assisted living. His son (a drunk and a drug addict) mooches hundreds of dollars from his grandmother. I think he is a charming sociopath, probably damaged in the womb by his druggie mother. He is scheduled to be released from prison in August. His four-year-old son (by his baby mama) is occasionally brought for visits to my aunt. She recently sent me a photo of him holding a fistful of cash that she had just given him. My aunt also has a granddaughter who only sees her to ask for money My aunt will be dead soon, and whatever money she passes on to her son, grandson and granddaughter, and great-grandson will be gone quickly. I wonder who they will mooch on after she’s gone.
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Jeff Gill said on July 3, 2026 at 11:46 am
If she had her babies in Jackson or Athens, especially if she alternated between the two, I think the maternity staff would have been hard pressed to keep two and two added up to come to sixteen. Especially with the staff turnover they have. There were surely bread crumbs, and like the cases I used to scotch tape to the back of my office door, we will see postmortems for county children services & school staff process failures, but the reality is, in Ohio for sure, if you are strongly focused on keeping official eyes off of you, you can succeed at that. It takes persistent refusal and a willingness to tell the story you need to maintain when forced to answer, but it is most assuredly possible. If you fill out one form a year, you can “homeschool” your kids with zero accountability or verification, and lying on that form isn’t hard at all.
Allow me this much: I stood for the better part of a rainy day on a stripped hilltop at the end of a long drive with an SRO, & ultimately four sheriff’s deputy vehicles and six or seven officers, outside a trailer with a recent deer slug hole in the front door, angled down at about two foot from the sill which was up a pile of concrete blocks. The watch sergeant who ended up on scene filled me in that the property owner and father of two of the three children I was tracing had seen his father’s body dead of a self-inflicted shotgun wound on a porch not three miles away a few months earlier.
We all stood there, waiting on radio traffic back and forth with the prosecutor’s office, to see if we could force entry to the doublewide. The girls’ clothing and bedroom effects (not many toys, but a few, mostly clothes and purses) were stacked on a picnic table and other piles of tarp covered debris all around the barren front yard.
Then the call came back from the assistant county prosecutor. No. We could not. I asked in the middle of the conversation if we could do so to check on the health of the owner if not on the condition of the children who had been missing from school for days. No, we could not. We couldn’t try the doorknob, let alone knock the door down. Soon, all four vehicles left, and it was just me & the SRO. He looked at me. I told him to turn around and enjoy the view. The door was locked. We left. The principal and I went back that afternoon to bag up and hold the clothing items scattered around.
This story had a qualified happy ending, sort of. Which I can’t describe. But I still remember the bemusement we all felt at knowing some kind of violence had taken place, couldn’t locate the children, but with no family having filed a report, none of us could take action. I spent three days sure someone, at least one, was dead against the inside of that door. I was wrong, he just shot to make a point to his now ex in a domestic discussion, as one does with a deer rifle.
Again, happy endings are relative, such as with this more recent story. But if the one man hadn’t exposed himself in public, who knows what it would have taken to get someone official inside that front door?
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Pam H said on July 3, 2026 at 12:25 pm
The TV News people on one of the channels here were speculating on what they could do with the children. One of their brilliant ideas was fostering. Who would be able to foster these kids? Other than the youngest, any child over 3 years old would have problems that even professionals would be hard pressed to handle. No trust. It’s an under statement. I’ve heard in the past that the problem is that if a child is not nurtured from the ages of 0-3, they have “altered brain architecture”. And usually nothing can be done after that. That was a major problem with adopted children from orphanages behind the iron curtain.
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Deborah said on July 3, 2026 at 1:37 pm
Devolution, that’s what I think is going on in this world. It’s going backwards and the planet is dying or at least dying as it relates to humans being able to live on it. How long will this take to be a complete catastrophe? I hope I’m dead by then.
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Suzanne said on July 3, 2026 at 2:01 pm
That story is horrid. Our son worked with Child Protection Services for several years and never saw anything this horrid but he saw a lot of awful things.
Home schooling laws are so lax in many states that homeschooling has become an easy way to cover for this type of thing.
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susan said on July 3, 2026 at 2:14 pm
Homeschooling is the habitat of brainwashing as well as of abuse, which is the same thing.
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A different Connie said on July 3, 2026 at 2:17 pm
Isn’t three sets of twins *extremely* odd?
In one news story, someone referred to the family as travelers; I wondered if they meant Travelers. And surely the mom has been abused. Sad all around.
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nancy said on July 3, 2026 at 3:04 pm
They’re not that kind of Traveler. I think they meant they just moved from time to time. Oh, and I had an editor with two sets of twins. They had a daughter, then set #1. He wanted to stop at three, she wanted five, so they compromised with four and then, bam, another set of twins, wife wins. He called the first pair the Biblical twins (Rachel and Jacob), and the second the British Royalty (James and Elizabeth). He was a great guy.
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Julie Robinson said on July 3, 2026 at 3:32 pm
PamH, that’s what I was writing about, the critical periods in brain development. I studied this back in college in the 70’s. The families we knew who adopted kids from the Russian orphanages were each wealthy, well educated, and fully committed. They still couldn’t make up for what those kids didn’t get in their earliest years.
Apparently the Great American Fair has been shut down this afternoon due to the heat. It would be a pity if it happened again tomorrow. Or did we want the two hour speech from the Orange Cheeto to happen regardless.
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David Cook said on July 3, 2026 at 5:19 pm
My cousin’s kids were home schooled. The oldest got his GED in the Army when he found how much less he knew than his fellow soldiers who went to actual high school. He’s an atheist now. The younger two are true believers. Both went to Liberty U. All three, you can tell, are really smart but they’re so miseducated that they have no idea what they don’t know.
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Jeff Gill said on July 3, 2026 at 5:57 pm
AP story with Julie Carr Smyth byline, one of the best at work in Ohio:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/ohio-town-shocked-by-16-kids-found-living-in-squalor-right-under-our-noses
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Mark P said on July 3, 2026 at 6:01 pm
I really, really want Trump to give a two-hour speech Saturday. If it’s really hot, do you think they can pay people enough to keep them there for two hours?
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Sherri said on July 3, 2026 at 7:14 pm
Much like extreme weather and climate change, I would guess that situations like this will happen more often in our current socio-political climate. You’ve got a movement, MAGA, that essentially believes we owe nothing to each other, backed by a religious sect that despite their claims of inerrancy, interpret the Bible such that empathy is a sin.
https://open.substack.com/pub/thegrimhistorian/p/has-america-crossed-the-asshole-threshold
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Jeff Borden said on July 3, 2026 at 10:37 pm
Him stroking out in the middle of diatribe in 100 degree plus weather is a distinct possibility.
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