Gary Siders Sr. is seventy-three years old, the paternal grandfather of the sixteen children removed from the Hamden house, and as of September 9, 2026, a defendant the court has found incompetent to stand trial, with a finding that his condition is not restorable. Judge Rogers accepted a forensic evaluation concluding that he cannot understand the proceedings or ᴀssist his lawyers and that treatment is not expected to change that. Prosecutor William Archer did not contest the report. Defense attorney Dorian Baum said the result was not surprising and that the prosecution against his client is likely heading toward a rapid end. Competency is not a verdict on guilt. It is a finding about present mental capacity. In practical terms, it freezes the criminal case against the oldest defendant while the state decides whether to dismiss, pursue other statutory options, or wait for a restoration that the evaluator said will not come.

The path to that ruling began in July, when Baum asked for evaluations on both competency and possible insanity at the time of the alleged offenses. He described a client who was confused about the roles of people in the courtroom and could not recount basic facts about himself. Siders Sr. had already fallen during a jail transfer and been hospitalized. The court converted his $300,000 cash bond to a recognizance bond of the same face value so he could receive medical care outside the jail, with the money becoming due if he violated conditions. Baum has argued that years of cognitive decline and physical limits complicate any simple picture of what the grandfather did or did not control inside the house. The indictment against him is narrower than those against his son, daughter-in-law, and wife: sixteen counts, ten of them third-degree felonies and six misdemeanors, rather than the nineteen-count mix facing the other three adults after the August grand jury. He was not named in the Sєx-abuse indictment that now hangs over Gary Jr. and Elizabeth.

The finding isolates him from the rest of the docket. Christina Siders, Gary Jr., and Elizabeth have also been ordered into competency and sanity evaluations at a state-designated forensic center. Those results were still pending as of mid-September for some of the remaining defendants. Christina has also sought gag-order protection around case details. The grandfather’s ruling does not erase the allegations that he lived in the house and was one of four adults charged after the June 30 search. It does mean that, unless a later court revisits the “not restorable” conclusion, there will be no trial in which a jury hears evidence about what he knew, what he did, or what he failed to do. Baum has framed the next steps as a question of health management rather than criminal proof. Archer retains the power to dismiss or to seek other statutory remedies. For a case that has been defined by images of children and by the number sixteen, the first major court resolution was not a conviction or an acquittal. It was a medical-legal finding that the oldest man charged will not be in the well of the courtroom when the rest of the family faces a jury.

That sequence is why the newly released dependency records and the truancy file have been read together. In 2020 the court accepted that education and development were already in crisis and still kept the children at home. In 2021 the court accepted new concerns about lead, medical follow-through, and household infestation and still kept the children at home. Months later the schools said six children were not coming at all. The sheriff found an empty house. The court closed the file. Child-welfare directors have declined to discuss anything beyond what the court has released. Dana Glᴀssburn of the relevant agency said courts can release information the agency cannot. Legal analysts have repeated the structural point: Ohio law does not require removal every time a child is found dependent. Protective supervision is a designed off-ramp. The Siders history shows the off-ramp working as written—plans completed, cases closed—and then shows what can happen when a family leaves the county that was watching them. The current criminal cases will be decided on 2026 evidence, not on 2020 case plans. The question the records leave hanging is narrower and harder: after two findings of dependency and a stack of truancy complaints, how did sixteen children become, for years, a household that the official world could not find until a warrant for something else opened the door.