16 Siders Kids: From The First Lie To The Last Free Pass

**Todd** (0:02)
This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Brueski and Robin Dre. Hi.

**Tony Brueski** (0:10)
How are you? Good morning, America. Yeah, it's good to be back, everybody. Thank you to Todd and Robin and everybody who made it to the show for the last several days. It was a great honeymoon. I'm glad to be back here in the studio and to talk about the world that continues to fall down around us.
Oh my God. Where do we even begin on this case? We're going to be focusing on the Siders today, the 16 kids horror story. This is like the Hills Have Eyes come to life, but it makes the Hills Have Eyes feel like the Ritz-Carlton diamond collection. Because it's just so beyond comprehension, or is it? Or is it? 16 children found in an Ohio home, Hamden, Ohio. Some who can't speak, some who can't read, an 18-year-old who can't write her own name, the AG calling it pure evil. The only reason anyone found them was a misdemeanor, because the guy couldn't stop showing his junk to the neighbors.
Okay.
We got a lot to get through today on this. Let's start with the Dollar General employee. I want to talk about competency. I want to talk initially about the people who saw this and said nothing. It's not to blame, but I think more systemically a problem in our society with situations like this because in my opinion, and I'm curious to know what you think, Robin, this is not an isolated incident.
It's certainly not with these folks to have attention being drawn to them, but I'm saying in general, there are people like this everywhere. We just like to look the other way. We like to drive through those neighborhoods and go, oh, what's going on with that house? There's no oversight. We don't fund the departments and the municipalities and the authorities and things that overlook the well-being of children and families to a level where they can investigate these sort of things and take care of these sort of things. And then we're all shocked when one of these finally reaches headline level. I bet someone challenged me with money today. I could go find a neighborhood and probably find about 10 of these, you know, in the course of an hour. If you know exactly where to look and you know the same. This is not a rare thing. And I think that that's important to remember. But let's start with the Dollar General employee, describing them to reporters in detail, hygiene, the clothes, the closing time runs for years, people noticing these folks, nobody reporting anything. But I guess, you know, you report it, and then what? I mean, what, nothing happens when people do. What do you make of this? Just all these people who have seen these people, maybe said something, maybe didn't say anything, and this sort of behavior just running rampant.

**Robin** (3:31)
There's so many aspects of this that just ring true, like you're saying, of the problems we have with our culture, our society, and just us as a species of what we do when we normalize or accept the normalized behavior that others present to us. And when that happens, what do you say? What do you do? Because I seriously doubt if people really wrestle too hard with what they saw because they didn't say anything. So there's numerous things that go into that. You have groupthink, and what happens a lot of times, groupthink, in fact, I mean, if you can actually Google this on YouTube, you can actually look it up and search it on YouTube, where you can actually see these social experiments, where you see someone need and fell down, like on a college campus, and they did it as an experiment, and they gave students a deadline to make it to class by, and you see people blowing by someone in obvious need on lying down, looking like they're in trauma, but because they themselves had something to get to, they'll blow by them because again, we're always going to look out for our own best interests. That's part of it. Then you also have the experiments that they did on the old Canada camera in Allen Fund, where you have three or four people on an elevator all facing one way, and they get the other person that is actually facing the right way to turn around because we don't want to look out of place. We want to fit in, we want to conform, and so that is part of what goes on here. Then you have the normalcy of a culture and situation, economic, social status, economic status that gets normalized. And in this case, if you have that many kids, basically, what was it, one a year or one every other, every year and a half, for like 18 years, they've desensitized the fact that their family does this. And granted, now, I don't know these people, but if you, so when we have liking, that happens, again, we have our own confirmation biases. And so say this person or a couple comes in, I'll just use conjectures, I don't know what it was like for this Dollar General employee, but say you walk in a front door, and even if you walk in, you smell, you're disheveled, your kids are in bare feet, it's an atrocious scene, but you present yourself nice, friendly, accommodating, little head tilt and smile, you're generous, gregarious, they're going to excuse so many behaviors because that first impression was a positive first impression. So that'll play into it if that's the case here, or in any other case. And so liking goes a long way in these things. And then when we look at systemic problems with institutions and organizations for childcare, for protective care, for services, these are reactive organizations, they're not proactive organizations. In other words, how many of these people are paid to go out and find problems, or are they paid to react to problems reported to them? So if no one reports a problem, there's not going to be any action. Then again, how the sausage is made here is the great Bob Mata says. How many of these people are paid a wage that they're going to attract people that actually want to give a shit? Granted, I know these people give a shit, but at the same time, if you're not being paid a good wage, because I definitely know that people that are working in these most critical areas of childcare, of foster homes, all these things, they're the most underpaid state employees in the entire country. And so when you couple all these things together, and then you have a family like this, I don't think their evading law enforcement or evading accountability was intentional. It's just a byproduct of their transient lifestyle because they couldn't make a wage anywhere because they got married when they were stupid young. She was 15 when the parents signed off. And so now you have generational stupid kicking in. They talk about generational trauma.