Siders 16 Kids: One More Day Meant WHAT?!

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Brueski and Robin Dreeke.

**Tony Brueski** (0:08)
Let's go to another case. 16 children, ages 18 months to 18 years, were removed from a house in Hamden, Ohio on June 30th. Four adults, the parents and the grandparents, are each charged with 16 counts of endangering children, and all four have pled not guilty. The attorney general called what they saw pure evil. The defense says it's poverty. Joining me, Robin Dreeke, retired FBI Special Agent, Chief of the Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program, who has spent a career reading why people do what they do. We welcome your thoughts in the comment section on Substack and YouTube as we break this down. Elizabeth Siders, your attorney, says this is a case of poverty and isolation, not evil.
I don't know. I've seen a lot of folks in poverty, close up and somewhat isolation, and they ain't putting 16 kids in a single room packed with animals and feces. That's not poverty.
They're saying, evil requires malice. Well, choosing to do that and walking in that room every day and seeing children like that, that would be called malice. Poverty doesn't teach a family to move across counties and leave no school or medical records for 20 years. Where does this all break down? How much of it is just poverty? And how much of this is depraved behavior that was normalized?

**Robin Dreeke** (1:33)
Yeah, let's go poverty round first. And yeah, having grown up with not much, not nearly as little as they had, but very not much, and knowing a lot of people living in poverty and doing a lot of studies on it, poverty can account for many things, but not these choices, because that's what the defense is going to want to say on this, but it's not the case at all, because the second part of that is what is really the cruel part and the really telling part is the isolation. Isolation is a choice, especially these days. And so then you ask yourself, what is the reason for the isolation?
People isolate out of fear. Now, fear can be generated because of shame, it can be generated out of embarrassment, or you're trying to hide something. When you look at the circumstances, and I did the research on this, when you're hiding something at this level, when you have 16 kids, you have a conjoined twins that die, you have the, and remember, there's isolation where you don't want to interact with the world, and then you have confinement where everyone's put into a room that they're not allowed out in. And it's again, like you said, feces, excrement, you name it, it was horrendous in there. The things that are typically hidden is abuse.
And then the S-abuse probability, very, very high. There's a lot of different abuse that's going on here. That is the general, if we're looking at laws of probability and research and profiling, the reason for isolation in cases like this is to hide abuse because of fear of being exposed. And so poverty, to me, it doesn't play nearly as much as the hiding of abhorrent behavior, and it's all a very conscious choice.

**Tony Brueski** (3:18)
I also wonder, you know, how much drugs played into this as well. Not that it's an excuse, but I saw somebody made the comment, like if the Duggars were on meth.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:27)
Yeah, probably.

**Tony Brueski** (3:28)
I mean, honestly, like if that had somehow creeped into their ecosystem and like slowly took over all of them, it's probably about what you'd see here is something like this.

**Robin Dreeke** (3:40)
This is Duggars without IBLP.

**Tony Brueski** (3:43)
Yeah, without IBLP and a lot of meth. It's like just mix that in there and see how dramatically that ingredient changes the recipe for what we're seeing and like what the finished product is coming out of the oven from hell. Elizabeth Siders was 15, seven months pregnant when a judge and both sets of parents signed off on her marriage. Seventeen years later, she's charged with 16 counts.
Obviously, there's the question, can a person be shaped into something and still be responsible for it? Let's start there.

**Robin Dreeke** (4:22)
Yeah, society says yes. The law says yes.
You can, you can, and this is always that interesting balance. You can have great empathy where it is you understand what made them. But just because you understand the abhorrent situation and generational chaos and generational unhealthy things doesn't mean it's not an excuse for still making a choice to do those things, because just as many cases as there are like this, there's just as many cases of people that are able to escape that as well because they're making choices, because the law still is the law. You can't do this. There is no excuse. And because, I mean, just look at the case we're facing with the mom in the Northeast, you know, with battling, because the level of trying to get someone to be able to claim insanity for their actions is so high because it still comes down to, do they know the difference between right and wrong? Yes. And no matter what excuse you want to make while I'm in poverty, I'm on drugs, I'm on meth, whatever it is, you're still making a choice to do abhorrent things to your children and raise them in the way that you didn't need to raise them. So they're making a choice to keep their kids locked in a house with no exposure outside and not clean up, not even sweep the crap out of there. I mean, just that's all a choice, 100% choice.