Dayton police officers responding to a welfare check found five children, ranging in age from 4 to 12, alone inside a boarded-up house with no food, no electricity and no adults anywhere on the property. The discovery happened around 12:30 p.m. last Thursday, Oct. 1, in the 3500 block of Delphos Avenue. The children were taken for medical evaluations and, after the evaluations, placed in the custody of Montgomery County Children Services.
Officers were dispatched to the home for the welfare check and found the children inside what police described as a nuisance-abated property, according to daytondailynews.com. Lt. Eric Sheldon told the outlet, “It appeared there was no food or electricity in the house. No adults were present.” The children were also reported found alone inside the boarded-up home without food or electricity, per authorities, as relayed by KATU.
Medical Checks, Then Custody Transfer
All five children were taken to Dayton Children's Hospital for a medical evaluation, the same reporting shows. After that evaluation, they were placed into the custody of Montgomery County Children Services, the agency charged with overseeing their care going forward. Officials said additional details about the children's condition were not available at this time.
The Dayton Police Department's CARE House Unit, which handles cases involving children, is now investigating the circumstances that led to the children being left alone in the house. No further specifics about how the children came to be in the property, or for how long, have been released.
A County Already Tracking Thousands of Reports
The case lands against a backdrop of sustained child-welfare activity across the county. Montgomery County reported that its Children Services Division received 3,134 reports screened in for assessment or investigation in 2025, including 1,526 related to child abuse and 1,326 related to neglect, according to Montgomery County, Ohio. The county also said those numbers reflect a downward trend that has held since 2021, though officials framed the decline as evidence that the work of protecting children in the county is far from finished.
Montgomery County maintains a confidential, 24-hour hotline at 937-224-KIDS (5437) for residents who want to report concerns about a child's welfare; callers may remain anonymous, and anyone who believes a child is in immediate danger is instructed to call 911 instead. The Delphos Avenue case is the kind of welfare check that hotline is designed to prompt, even though it's unclear whether this particular case originated from a tip or another source.
Echoes Of Other Cases, With Key Differences
Cases involving multiple children found alone or in unsafe housing have surfaced elsewhere in recent memory, though the details vary widely from what happened in Dayton. In one southern Ohio village, authorities removed 16 siblings from a squalid home and arrested their parents and grandparents, according to PBS News. Separately, a sheriff in rural North Carolina said a two-month-old baby was among six children under age 11 found unsupervised in a home without a functioning toilet, as reported by the Charlotte Observer. Neither case has been shown to involve arrests, charges or additional parallels to the Dayton situation, and no such outcomes have been confirmed in the Delphos Avenue investigation.
For now, the CARE House Unit's investigation remains open, and Montgomery County Children Services has custody of the five children while the circumstances that left them alone in a powerless, food-less house are sorted out.
