Siders' 16 Kids: Who Was Ever Supposed To Find Them?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This is Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski. Here now, Tony Brueski.

**Tony Brueski** (0:07)
The officers who found the 16 children, the Siders 16 children in that house of horror, were not looking for them.
Did you know that?
Deputies in Vinton County, Ohio went to a house in Hamden on a warrant that had nothing to do with children. Ohio Attorney General Andy Wilson has said they had no expectation that any of the kids were inside. The school district had no record of them existing. The neighbors did not know they were there. No caseworker had ever knocked on that door. They opened it for an unrelated reason. Because dad liked to allegedly show his junk to the neighbors. And found 16 kids.
The oldest is 18 years old. Investigator said she could not write her own name. Hold on to her because she is the whole story. We're going to come back to her in just a second. And give us your thoughts in the comment section on Substack and YouTube. Be sure to press subscribe wherever you're watching or listening so you don't miss any of our coverage of this case. And I'd love to get your thoughts. We'll continue our conversation there as we move through this. Four adults have now been charged each with 16 counts of second degree felony child endangering. All four have pled not guilty. No grand jury has returned an indictment and everything the state alleges remains an allegation until a jury says otherwise. But this part is not an allegation. Sixteen children were found by accident. I start with how invisible they were because that's the part that should simply not be possible. Investigators believe the family had moved through more than one Ohio County over the years and had largely stayed off the record that most families leave behind without thinking about it. No enrollment, no documented doctor visits anyone can point to other than giving birth, the kind of paper trail that follows the rest of us from birth and that nobody in that house seems to have ever generated. The sheriff has described the conditions inside as worse than the conditions the animals on the property were kept in. That's his account. The defense also wants to have theirs, but the conditions are not the thing that should keep you here. The thing that should keep you here is simpler. Sixteen children lived in that house and the state of Ohio did not know a single one of them was alive.
How? How? How?
How did no one know about them?
Not underestimated the number, not knew about them and failed to act, did not know they existed. 16 human beings born over the better part of two decades in the state that issues birth certificates and runs schools and funds child protection had formed no picture of any of them. They were citizens of Ohio the way a rumor is a citizen, on paper somewhere. And no where in practice. And then 13 days after they were found, money showed up. The Ohio Controlling Board approved $1 million in emergency funding to care for them. Came out of the state account that already existed, already had money in it, already had the word contingency in the name. Remember that number because it answers a question most people never think to ask. The question is this, whose job was it to find them? Everyone assumes there's an answer. Everyone assumes that somewhere in the machinery of a modern state, there is a person in office, a program, whose actual assignment is to notice a child who has fallen off the map. Guess what? There is not. In the Siders case, is what that absence looks like when you finally see it. As we all tell ourselves, oh, well, the system will do this. There's something in place for this or that. There isn't. There isn't. Maybe alluded to on paper. Maybe there's sometimes even departments of these sort of things. But when they're not staffed, they're not funded, there's nobody there to do these jobs. Do they really exist? Or is it more of an idea than an actual inaction?
Agency or person? Think about how the oldest child came into the world. Court records indicate she was born when her mother was 15 years old. A birth like that happened somewhere in a hospital, the midwife in a system that generates a record. 15-year-old giving birth is not invisible in that moment. Somebody is standing right there in some state. Ron O'Brien spent decades as the prosecutor in Franklin County, Ohio, talking about cases like this. He has made the point that a birth to a girl that young is exactly the moment a mandated reporter is supposed to stop and ask a hard question. A 15-year-old does not become pregnant without an adult somewhere having a great deal to answer for. That question is supposed to get asked in the room out loud by someone whose legal job it is to ask.