Authorities removed 16 children from an Ohio horror house in Hamden after finding them during an unrelated investigation on Tuesday. The children, ages 1 1/2 to 18, were taken from a home where seven later went to hospitals and child welfare officials took temporary custody.
By Thursday, four adults — Gary Siders Jr., Gary Siders, Elizabeth Siders and Christina Siders — had pleaded not guilty to child endangerment and were held on $300,000 bond each. One of the children taken to a hospital was in critical condition.
Hamden home discovery
The children were not enrolled in school, had been kept mostly in a small room and had gone largely unseen by neighbors, who said they had never spotted them. Those details came to light only after authorities went to the home on Tuesday on an unrelated investigation and found the siblings inside.
Over the past two decades, the family moved around. Thomas Stolly said all of the children were born in area hospitals, which points to a long paper trail that did not match the life the children were living by the time authorities found them.
Elizabeth Siders and Thomas Stolly
Thomas Stolly said Elizabeth Siders was “crying and exhausted” when he met with her on Thursday. He said her first concern was her children: “In fact, my client's first question to me when I walked into the jail and introduced myself was about her kids. She asked if her children were OK, she asked if I knew where they were, and she asked when she'd be able to see them again,” Stolly said.
He added, “but I thought it was telling that her first concern was not, 'When can I get out of jail,' but was 'Are my children OK.'” Stolly also said, “Evil requires malice, and I did not see any malice i,” pushing back on Ohio Attorney General Andy Wilson's description of the family as “pure evil.”
Ohio Attorney General Andy Wilson
The case now sits with child welfare officials, who have temporary custody of the children while the child endangerment charges move forward against the four adults. Elizabeth Siders was 15 when she married Gary Siders Jr., and she left high school after the 11th grade, Stolly said, giving the family’s private life a public record that now centers on the children’s safety and where they go from here.
