A Michigan mother will not fight criminal charges after police discovered she had abandoned her three children — ages 12, 13, and 15 — leaving them to survive alone in a home without running water or working toilets.
Kelli Bryant, 35, of Pontiac, Michigan, entered a no contest plea to three counts of first-degree child abuse. Her children told officers they had been on their own since 2020 or 2021. They were found during a welfare check on Valentine’s Day 2025.
What investigators found inside the home was disturbing. Garbage was stacked nearly four feet high. Feces covered the floors and filled the bathtub. The toilet was overflowing. Mold had spread throughout the home. The two younger daughters, both girls, had been sleeping on pizza boxes. Their brother slept on a mattress on the floor.
The children had stopped going to school. They rarely left the house. Bryant and an unidentified individual would occasionally drop off food. Bryant had some contact with her 15-year-old son but reportedly never spoke to or saw her two younger daughters. She had them saved in her phone as “Kid 1” and “Kid 2.”
A detective who responded to the scene testified that in his career he had never smelled a home that bad without a decomposing body present. When investigators interviewed Bryant, she arrived well-dressed, nails and hair done.
She reportedly told the detective: “I hurt my children. I sacrificed my children, probably.”
Bryant had already pleaded no contest to welfare fraud in June after it was discovered she had collected public assistance funds intended for the children she abandoned. Her parental rights were terminated in April. The children have since been placed with relatives.
Bryant is scheduled to be sentenced on September 1.