16 Siders Kids: The Neighbors' Story Doesn't Add Up

**SPEAKER_1** (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. 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 this. I mean, 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, and 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 Dre** (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, Google is 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 in 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, 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 wanna fit in, we wanna 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 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 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.