The sixteen children were discovered on June 30 in Hamden, a village in Vinton County, when law enforcement went to the property to serve arrest warrants on Gary Siders II and Elizabeth Siders on charges unrelated to the neglect of their children. Several of the children were found near death; two were flown to a level one trauma medical facility, where one was placed in an intensive care unit, according to reports cited by The Guardian. Six of the children are twins aged four or younger. All sixteen are now in foster care.

The cost pressure is acute in Vinton County, with fewer than 13,000 residents Ohio’s least populous county. The county’s family services department estimates the per-child cost of caring for the Siders children at about $200 per day. South Central Ohio Job and Family Services, which oversees three rural southern Ohio counties including Vinton, saw its overall costs rise from less than $4 million in 2015 to more than $10 million in 2024. Property tax levies in the region fall well short of meeting those costs, The Guardian reported.

Twelve months before the children were found, Jody Walker, the head of South Central Ohio Job and Family Services, stood before a state senate finance committee in Columbus and urged lawmakers for help. “I have been a county director since 1999, yet I have not seen such a challenging time in the child welfare system as I do today,” he said, “specifically in terms of the needs of our children.” Walker’s agency, which oversees three rural counties in southern Ohio, frequently saw children sleeping at the organization’s office because they had no other safe place to go, according to The Guardian.

Angela Sausser of the Public Children Services Association of Ohio, which represents public children services agencies in the state, told The Guardian that paid placement costs have risen 41% since 2020, far outpacing inflation, and that residential and group home care costs have risen by more than 65%. “While the state share [of spending on children services] has been rising over the last eight years, from 10% to 20%, it still falls below the national average of 42%,” Sausser said. “County leaders should not have to choose among services for vulnerable children, public safety, seniors and those with behavioral health needs or developmental disabilities,” she added.

For more than thirty years, Republicans have broadly controlled governing and lawmaking in Ohio, regularly holding a supermajority in the state legislature, The Guardian reported. According to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a private philanthropic organization that focuses on children’s needs, the share of Ohio children living in high-poverty areas has fallen in recent years, while figures for child deaths, children without health insurance, and children aged three and four who are not in school have all risen.

A case worker reported in 2020 that the Siders children suffered from high levels of lead, according to The Guardian. Last year, Republican lawmakers in Ohio cut funding for a lead abatement program from $7.5 million to $250,000 a year, The Guardian reported. Financial disclosure information published by Los Angeles magazine found that Elizabeth Siders had no income and that her husband’s salary amounted to $1,500 per month in 2021.

At the federal level, the Trump administration’s 2027 budget proposal includes cuts to nutrition programs for women and children, home energy assistance for low-income families, a $6 billion cut to the National Institutes of Health budget, and the elimination of a federal preschool development grant program, The Guardian reported. Cuts to food benefits for an estimated one million children are under way. Citing data and research, The Guardian reported that children in states governed by Republican leadership face higher risk factors than those run by Democrats or members of both parties, and that infant mortality rates in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas are more than 50% higher than in New York and California.

The office of Ohio Attorney General Andy Wilson, a Republican, declined to comment when The Guardian asked, among other things, whether he believed the state of Ohio had failed the Siders children. Search warrant materials have been sealed by a judge, and a separate gag order restricts public comment by attorneys for the accused and law enforcement. Wilson has said the adults in the Siders household were “pretty adept at keeping these kids out of sight and out of the eyes of investigators” and called the family members responsible for the abuse “pure evil.”

State authorities have opened their own review. Jodi Norton Trimble of the Ohio Department of Children and Youth said the agency initiated a review “to determine how the county public children services agency followed federal and state requirements and to provide technical assistance on best practice.” The DCY report is expected by the end of the year but must be completed “without interfering with the criminal investigations that are ongoing,” Norton Trimble said.

The family had been in contact with Ohio authorities before the June 30 discovery. When the Siders family lived in neighboring Gallia County in 2020, a staff member from that county’s department of jobs and family services reported finding the children in desperate conditions, prompting court-ordered protective supervision. By May 2021, that supervision was terminated, and the family moved out of Gallia County. That same year, school officials in Gallia County filed a juvenile court complaint reporting that several of the children had become habitually truant. Local authorities lost track of the family as it moved again. “I believe the school made contact with the appropriate school district where the family was living in West Virginia. However, before authorities could take action, the family moved again,” a Gallia juvenile court representative told The Guardian.

Elizabeth Siders was fifteen years old when she was married in West Virginia, where, before 2023, a child of any age could legally be married with judicial permission, The Guardian reported. She gave birth to her first child shortly after at the Holzer health system outside Gallipolis, Ohio, and would ultimately give birth to nine children at the facility, according to reports cited by The Guardian. She was thirty-four at the time of the Hamden incident and had been pregnant every fifteen months. Her attorneys have called for a mental health evaluation to determine whether she is competent to stand trial.

The four defendants — Gary Siders Sr., Christina Siders, Gary Siders II, and Elizabeth Siders — were each charged with sixteen counts of child endangerment, and in August the parents were additionally charged on separate counts of sexual battery and unlawful sexual conduct with a minor who was not their own child, according to The Guardian. All four have pleaded not guilty to the charges.