Some of the 16 children discovered at an Ohio home in deplorable conditions were unable to speak, and one — an 18-year-old who was developmentally disabled — could not even write her name.
After being rescued June 30 from a home in the rural village of Hamden in southern Ohio, seven kids were taken to hospitals, including one who was in critical condition, investigators said. Their conditions weren’t immediately known Thursday. Child welfare officials have temporary custody of the children.
If what investigators allege is true, it could be the beginning of a difficult road ahead to undo years of 𝘢bu𝘴e, neglect and trauma. Not all foster families can accommodate such severe cases. Ohio also has a shortage of foster families and it’s getting harder to recruit, like in many states.
Some children could be placed into specialized treatment centers as part of their recovery.
“It’s going to take a lot of work to address the emotional harm and some of the issues that are going to result from this,” Ohio Attorney General Andy Wilson said during a news conference this week, adding he’s seen nothing like the conditions that the children were subjected to.
“But we need to make sure those kids are surrounded and loved and supported by people who truly care for them,” he said.
Four adults, who are parents and grandparents of the children, were arrested on child endangerment charges. Defense attorneys have urged people not to draw conclusions and wait for the facts to come out in the case.
What similar cases have shown
Other cases have shown the challenges that lie ahead after children are rescued from horribly abusive conditions. In one case in Michigan, children were left alone in a home in conditions so offensive that police evidence technicians wore hazmat suits.
In Southern California, 13 children were rescued from their home in 2018 after being locked up for years and starved by their parents.
Like in Ohio, the 𝘢bu𝘴e in the Turpin home went unnoticed in the community of Perris, about 60 miles (96 kilometers) southeast of Los Angeles, until then-17-year-old Jordan Turpin escaped from the house and called police. When the 13 siblings were rescued, all but the 2-year-old were severely underweight and hadn’t bathed for months.
The parents, David and Louise Turpin, pleaded guilty to torture and years of 𝘢bu𝘴e and were sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 25 years.
The children were later failed at different points by a social services system that was supposed to help them transition to new lives and treat their trauma.
Six of the Turpin siblings went to a foster home where they said they were again abused. In a lawsuit, they described being hit with sandals and forced to eat their own vomit. The foster family pleaded guilty in the case and the foster father was sentenced in 2024 to seven years in prison.
A 2022 report from a law firm hired by Riverside County to investigate the children’s care concluded that the county’s social services system was short-staffed and underfunded, leaving workers struggling with high caseloads that made it hard to ensure safety and care “for our most vulnerable populations.”
Ohio’s overwhelmed foster system
Not all foster families have the capacity to help in complex cases where children are dealing with a multitude of traumas, said Scott Britton, assistant director of the Public Children Services Association of Ohio.
The system is already overwhelmed, with one in four children in Ohio coming into foster care not due to 𝘢bu𝘴e or neglect, but behavioral health issues, developmental disabilities or juvenile justice involvement, Britton said.
“We have a lot of kids with significant and serious needs, not all of which unfortunately can be met by a foster family,” he said, noting that residential care facilities and psychiatric treatment centers have to step in. “So we unfortunately are all too accustomed to managing a very broad range of significant deficits in children.”
Many states’ child welfare systems are overburdened.
State and federal data show worker turnover rates can range from 20% to 40% in some places due to burnout and the emotional toll. Recruitment is another challenge, as state agencies struggle to attract and keep qualified workers, with rural areas and high-need regions often hit the hardest.
In New Mexico, the state child agency is facing legal action over what the New Mexico Department of Justice has described as systemic failures. It outlined systemic failures in a scathing report released in April, with the state’s top prosecutor pointing to the deaths of 14 children in the last two years. Attorney General Raúl Torrez said the circumstances were tied to lapses in decision-making and oversight at the Children, Youth and Families Department.
Ohio has made new investments in children’s services and behavioral health resources, and Britton is hopeful that a statewide Medicaid-managed care plan specifically for children and adolescents with significant behavioral health challenges can help.
“I’m not saying it’s enough,” he said. “We could use more and a lot of it depends on where you’re located.”
In California, Riverside County and a foster care agency reached a $13.5 million settlement with the six Turpin siblings put into an abusive foster home.
Their attorneys said that the case helped spur critical improvements in the county’s child welfare system.
Nearly four years after the rescue of the Turpin children in California, Jennifer Turpin told ABC News in a 2021 interview that she was ready to move on with her life.
“I want the Turpin name to be, like, ‘Wow, they’re strong, they’re not broken,’” she said.
She has since published a book about her journey called, “Where was God?”
💔 STELLA PARTON BREAKS HER SILENCE — What She Said About Dolly’s Health Has Fans Looking Back
Dolly Parton’s Sister Breaks Silence What Really Happened - GMT - G1
Stella Parton was born May 4, 1949, the sixth of twelve children raised by Robert Lee and Avie Lee Parton in Sevierville, Tennessee — a household defined by noise, limited money, and almost no privacy, the kind of environment that produced strong, determined personalities.
Stella was one of them.
By seven, she was appearing alongside her older sister Dolly on a Knoxville television program; by her teens, she was writing her own songs, though marriage and motherhood pulled music to the margins of her life for a stretch.
The dream never fully disappeared.
In 1967, she recorded a gospel album with her mother and sisters, and later worked clubs in Washington, D.C., before founding her own record label in 1975 and releasing “I Want to Hold You in My Dreams Tonight,” which climbed to number nine on the country charts.
Long before any of that commercial success, Stella had already shown a willingness to take positions others avoided.
At 26, amid backlash against Australian singer Olivia Newton-John for winning recognition in country music, Stella recorded “Ode to Olivia” in her defense — a stand that offered her no career benefit and real risk of criticism, but one she took anyway simply because she believed staying silent was the wrong choice.
That instinct defined the rest of her career: hits like “The Danger of a Stranger” and “Steady as the Rain” (written by Dolly) built a genuine, independent following, including in the U.K., while Stella also worked in New York theater and spoke openly, often controversially, about poverty, domestic violence, and the treatment of women in the music industry.
She was named the Christian Country Music Association’s Female Vocalist of the Year in 2004.
Through all of it, she remained defined publicly, more often than not, as simply “Dolly’s little sister” — a label she spent five decades quietly proving didn’t tell the full story.
That same directness is why her comments in the fall of 2025 carried real weight.
Stella had never positioned herself as the family’s image manager or spokesperson; she was, by reputation, someone who believed difficult truths shouldn’t stay hidden indefinitely.
What she described wasn’t dramatic or accusatory — it was a portrait of a woman who had spent years prioritizing everyone else’s needs over her own.
The context mattered.
Carl Dean, Dolly’s husband of nearly sixty years, died in March 2025 at 82, after a long illness during which Dolly had devoted herself almost entirely to his care.
She later acknowledged that in the process, she’d neglected her own health significantly.
The loss reverberated through the whole extended family — the Partons had lost three brothers in the years surrounding this period, compounding grief that, for a family that had once crowded twelve children into a single small home, meant losing pieces of a shared childhood one after another.
Stella herself went seven years without releasing new music during this stretch, later describing the period simply as one shaped by sorrow, while still speaking about the importance of finding moments of laughter within it.
Looking back, one moment reads very differently in hindsight than it did at the time: in late September 2025, Dolly postponed her planned Las Vegas residency, citing health challenges — a rare cancellation for a performer whose six-decade career had included very few of them.
At the time, most fans treated it as a minor, temporary setback.
Stella’s later reflections suggested the signs had actually been building for some time, visible to family in ways the public smile made easy to miss.
That concern crystallized publicly not long after, when Dolly’s younger sister Frieda posted a simple request on Facebook asking fans to pray for Dolly.
What looked at first like an ordinary, well-meaning gesture spread rapidly, sparking widespread speculation about how serious Dolly’s condition actually was.
Dolly herself responded directly within days, appearing in a video from a Grand Ole Opry commercial shoot, insisting with her familiar humor that she wasn’t finished yet — the now widely remembered “I ain’t dead yet” moment that briefly quieted public concern.
In the months that followed, the pattern repeated: reassuring updates about kidney stones, dehydration, and treatment, paired with continued work on new projects, right up until Dolly Parton’s death on August 25, 2026, at 80.
Looking back across that full timeline — the postponed residency, the family’s public worry, Stella’s own account of a sister who consistently deprioritized her own wellbeing — it becomes easier to see what the people closest to Dolly understood well before the rest of the world did: that the warmth and resilience the public saw every time she appeared on camera came at a real, largely invisible cost.
