Christina Siders, the 67-year-old Hamden grandmother charged after sixteen children were removed from a rented house on Ohmer Street, is no longer only fighting a three-hundred-thousand-dollar bond. Her lawyer is now asking Vinton County to pay for a specialist who can say whether dementia, not defiance, is shaping what she understands of the case against her. The request landed in early October, days after a doctor who examined her on September 5 wrote that she carries several risk factors for dementia and that a full neuropsychological workup is needed before anyone can decide if her cognitive trouble is the product of that disease.

ᴀssistant Ohio Public Defender Kandra Roberts put the price at seven thousand dollars and asked that the evaluation be finished before a competency hearing is set. That filing sits on top of a summer of motions in which the same lawyer has tried to recast Siders not as the architect of the household authorities later called a house of horrors, but as the only adult who kept the lights on after the house stopped being a two-person home. Court papers described by reporters say Christina and her husband, Gary Siders Sr., had lived alone until their son, Gary Siders Jr., his wife Elizabeth, and the children moved in, turning a modest rental into a group of roughly twenty. Roberts wrote that Christina was the only adult who had long been providing for every other adult and every child under that roof, paying rent, utilities, and other necessities while also managing her husband’s serious medical needs. The same papers say she neglected her own documented medical and mental-health problems, and that those problems would be better treated outside jail.

She has pleaded not guilty. Prosecutors have opposed any loosening of the bond, arguing that she faces multiple felony counts, that competency results were still outstanding when they filed, and that she remains a flight risk and a potential harm to the victims. Her current indictment, as reported by The Columbus Dispatch, is two second-degree felony counts of endangering children, ten third-degree felony counts, and seven first-degree misdemeanor counts. A September 21 bond hearing never happened. Overnight rain flooded the Vinton County Courthouse in McArthur, a Level 3 emergency closed roads, and Judge Laina Fetherolf Rogers was with the volunteer fire department. The hearing has not been the only delay. Gary Siders Sr., 73, was earlier released on a recognizance bond because of frequent medical treatment; a later evaluation found him incompetent and not restorable.

Competency reports on Gary Jr. and Elizabeth have been completed but not publicly disclosed, with hearings still pending. Elizabeth, after a separate grand-jury indictment became public in September, pleaded not guilty and saw her bail rise, with reporting putting the combined figure at five hundred fifty thousand dollars after prosecutors called her a flight risk and a danger to the victims. Gary Jr. and Elizabeth also face Sєxual-battery and unlawful-Sєxual-conduct counts. Two other men, Joshua Saunders III and Brandon Henderson Sr., were indicted as the investigation widened. None of that answers the question the newest motion actually puts to the court: if the woman the defense calls the sole provider cannot reliably ᴀssist her lawyer, the bond fight and the endangerment counts may both have to wait on a dementia exam the county has not yet agreed to fund.