Chilling audio captures frantic heartbreaking search for 5 people, including two sets of parents, who died in mass drowning

Chilling police audio captured rescuers’ frantic heart-wrenching search for five people, including two sets of parents, who died in a mass drowning in an Ohio river – leaving two young children orphans. “They had a 5-year-old walking out on along the road.… There’s someone in the water there,” a Delaware County dispatcher can be heard saying on the radio around 9:25 p.m.

Sunday. Moments earlier, a passing motorist had called 911 after spotting the frantic little boy begging for help on a busy street near the Scioto River in the Columbus suburb of Powell. The terrified child told the driver that his “family was in the river,” Delaware County Sheriff Jeffrey Balzer said at a news conference Monday. What began as a carefree summer evening of fishing from the shoreline turned tragic when one adult in the group went in the water to swim and began struggling, prompting two other adults to jump in to try to save the person, Balzer said. When those two adults also began struggling, another two adults rushed into the river in a desperate rescue attempt, the sheriff explained. None of the five made it back to shore. Responding deputies quickly found the two children at the scene – and soon realized the horrifying scale of the tragedy, according to the dispatch audio obtained by The Post. “The bodies are in there.There are two young juveniles [on shore]– a young male and a young female.

They don’t have any parents,” an officer said over the radio. Another responder devastatingly added: “We have some clothes and some shoes out in the water.”A “language barrier” between cops and the children – both under 10 years old – initially made it difficult to determine how many people needed rescuing, according to the dispatch audio and Balzer. “Chief, it sounds like we had eight people in the water – we got five out; three confirmed missing,” an officer said over the radio.“We are going to need a boat, we got some lighting coming...