PONTIAC, Mich. (Court TV) — A mother had nothing to say in court as she faced sentencing for abandoning her children for years in a filthy home filled with rotten food and feces.
Kelli Bryant appears at her sentencing on Sept. 1, 2026. (Court TV)
Kelli Bryant, 35, previously pleaded no contest to three counts of child abuse after her children were found living alone in a home with no running water, functioning toilets or supervision. The children were ages 9, 10 and 12 when they were first left in the home, investigators said, and were 12, 13 and 15 when they were found.
“You failed them. And you failed them hour after hour, day after day, month after month and year after year,” Judge Mary Ellen Brennan said at Bryant’s sentencing on Tuesday. “They lived in utter filth with no guidance, no supervision and no protection. With no medical care, no access to education and little face-to-face human contact except for each other.”
When they were found in February 2025, the children told officers that they had been abandoned in the home in 2020. For five years, Bryant or others had dropped off prepared food outside the house once a week. The children had no other contact with the outside world. The oldest child told officers that he left the house twice in the five years he was in the home; the first time was to check the mail and the second was just a quick trip outside to touch the grass.
Inside the house, the two girls slept on pizza boxes instead of a bed. First responders said trash was piled 4 feet high inside the house. “The toilet was not working and overflowing. Human feces in the bathtub so they couldn’t have access to a bath,” Brennan said. “If the Department of Corrections housed you the way that you housed them, you’d file a lawsuit against them; and you’d win.”
Brennan noted that the professionals who came to clean the house after the children were found wore hazmat suits and gas masks.
Brennan sentenced Bryant to six to 30 years in prison for each count, with the sentences running concurrently. The sentence was not part of a plea agreement, but both prosecutors and the defense had agreed to it. Prosecutors said their decision to support a lower sentence than guidelines would have suggested stemmed from their desire to spare the children from testifying in court.
A family court judge previously terminated Bryant’s parental rights. She also received a sentence of time served and supervision after she admitted to collecting nearly $30,000 in welfare payments for the children she abandoned.
