Five Adults Drowned in the Scioto River Trying to Save One Struggling Swimmer — and Two Children Under 10 Watched It All

Five people entered the Scioto River north of Columbus last Sunday to pull one struggling swimmer to safety. None of them came back. By Monday morning, recovery crews had pulled five bodies from the water, and the only people who had watched the chain of drownings unfold were two children under the age of 10, now in the custody of Ohio child services ²³⁴.

The scale of the loss is what makes it stick. This was not a lone swimmer who got caught in a current. It was a single failed rescue that pulled in, one after another, every adult close enough to try ³⁵⁶. The math is what the families are left with: one person in trouble, five people dead.

The group had gathered on July 19 along the Scioto River near Powell, in Delaware County, for a fishing outing ³⁶. One of them went into the water for a swim and began struggling in a deeper section. Several people went in after them. One by one, the rescuers were pulled under ³⁵⁶. Two women were rushed to hospitals Sunday evening and pronounced dead. The bodies of three men were recovered from the river Monday morning ⁷⁴.

Two children under the age of 10 were the only witnesses on the riverbank ¹¹. They ran for help. A motorist called 911 after spotting a "clearly distraught" child along the road, according to the Delaware County sheriff ²⁴.

Delaware County Sheriff Jeffrey Balzer called the incident a "tragedy" ⁴. That is the only verbatim characterization from him that the reporting on file actually carries. He did not, in the documents reviewed here, describe the 911 audio as "gut-wrenching" or credit the children with "extraordinary composure" — language that circulated widely in coverage of the case, but which this newsroom cannot trace to a primary statement ²³⁴.

Later reporting identified the five victims as two married couples from Honduras and a teenager. The named dead include 33-year-old Jose Mario Pine… ⁵⁸⁹. Four of the five were Honduran, according to both ABC and AP ⁵⁹. At the time the HeyDay video aired on July 22, names had not been officially released; the identifications that followed came in the days afterward ⁵⁸.

What has been released is not, despite early characterizations, a recording of the children themselves placing the call. It is dispatch and officer radio traffic. A recording captured a Delaware County dispatcher saying: "They had a 5-year-old walking out on along the road. … There's someone in the water there" ¹⁰.

That is the only direct quotation from the 911 record that the sources on file support. The children's own voices on the line — the audio that, fairly or not, the public came to associate with this case — is not in the reporting reviewed here, and the newsroom has not independently confirmed its release ¹⁰¹¹. The distinction matters: dispatch audio of officers and a dispatcher describing what they were being told is not the same as the children's pleas themselves.

The basic shape of the day is not in serious dispute: a group outing, a swimmer in trouble, a cascade of would-be rescuers. Where coverage diverges is in the edges. Some accounts frame the gathering as a family fishing trip; others describe it more loosely as a group of family and friends ³⁶. Sources also differ slightly on how many adults initially entered the water before others followed, and on the precise timing of the first 911 call versus the first rescue attempt ²³⁶⁷. None of those gaps changes the bottom line. They do change how clean any single telling of the afternoon can be.

The children are now in the custody of child services, and investigators continue to work through how a single outing along a slow-moving river turned, in the space of minutes, into five deaths and two small witnesses ²¹¹.

The case is, at bottom, an arithmetic problem with no clean answer. One swimmer. Five rescuers. Two children who did what the adults around them could not — got out, ran, and brought strangers back to a river that had already taken everyone who had gone in.