Posted on 04/30/2016 6:09:10 AM PDT by HomerBohn
Sympathy and money for the Rhodens dried up as soon as it was revealed they were selling marijuana. Even worse, most have ignored victim Hannah Gilley and her own family.
PIKETON, Ohio — A family murdered for no apparent reason evokes a lot of sympathy from a community.
Unless that family was dealing drugs.
Drugs are so prevalent in this rural swath of the country that highway signs provide drivers with a number to report impaired—not drunk—drivers.
So less than a week after this community rallied to support the families of the eight people shot to death in their beds by an unknown killer or killers on Friday, much of that support began to dry up on Sunday evening when the state’s attorney general revealed that the Rhoden family appeared to have been selling large quantities of marijuana.
Since then, donations to help cover the tremendous cost of burying so many people have all but stopped, according to Rev. Phil Fulton.
“Why not give to give someone a decent burial?” Fulton wondered aloud to reporters. “Don’t they deserve that?”
The cold-blooded massacre shocked Cincinnati restaurateur Jeff Ruby enough on Saturday that he offered a $25,000 reward for anyone who gave police information that led to solving the crime. On Thursday, Ruby rescinded the offer due to “recent complex criminal developments,” he tweeted.
All that small-town goodwill for the Rhodens sure didn’t last very long, but for the family of Hannah Gilley, who was engaged to Frankie Rhoden and was also murdered, Piketon’s goodwill never started.
“It’s all Rhodens, Rhodens, Rhodens, and everybody seems to forget about Hannah,” Patty Hammond, owner of the town’s only bar, told The Daily Beast on Wednesday night.
Hammond will host a fundraiser on Saturday for Hannah—a poker run since it’s motorcycle season as well as a party at the tavern with enough bands and booze to draw in riders from across Pike and Adams counties.
Hannah’s aunt and uncle have also been working on behalf of her grief-stricken parents to organize fundraisers to help with funeral costs.
Hannah Gilley, 20, was the only person murdered in what appears to be a planned execution on Friday in Piketon, Ohio who was not a member of the Rhoden family. Friends of the Gilley family are holding two fundraisers on Saturday to help with funeral costs.
Hannah Gilley, 20, was the only person murdered in what appears to be a planned execution on Friday in Piketon, Ohio who was not a member of the Rhoden family. Friends of the Gilley family are holding two fundraisers on Saturday to help with funeral costs.
A friend of Hannah’s walked into Piketon’s Riverside Restaurant on Thursday to post a flier for an upcoming fundraiser for the Gilley family. Sarah, who didn’t want to give her last name, was busy putting fliers up all around Piketon and nearby Waverly, advertising a $5 car wash on Saturday evening. Hannah’s parents, however, are laying low.
‘They’re trying to keep to themselves,” Sarah said. “They don’t want their words twisted.”
Members of the Gilley family couldn’t be reached today, but considering how small and sparsely populated this area is it’s not at all shocking to learn they are trying to stay out of the public eye—this is the biggest thing to happen in Piketon since, well, since Piketon became Piketon.
The Gilleys’ daughter had a wonderful sense of humor, her friend and former classmate Riley Pritchard said on Thursday as she idly smoked a cigarette—everyone here idly smokes cigarettes—in front of Piketon’s abandoned elementary school.
“She loved pets, and she loved being outside,” Riley said, adding Hannah was funny enough to make just about anyone laugh.
Perhaps due to the incomprehensible massacre, or the fact that it is not yet a week old, 19-year-old Riley still speaks of Hannah in the present tense.
“She’s a really nice girl. She’s very, very pretty too.”
Two men approached as she spoke, all rednecks and jailhouse tattoos and teeth stained by tobacco like a lot of other young men around here, and asked to borrow money for the cigarettes that sit in virtually every Pike County hand.
“I don’t have no money. My boyfriend gave me these cigarettes,” Pritchard told the pair of the dukes in her pocket. “And he’s saving his money for us to go on a date.”
The older of the two, who didn’t want to give his name, didn’t know much about Hannah, but said if you were the type of person to smoke weed or pop pills you had probably heard of the Rhodens, at least some of the younger ones.
“Tell you what, you buy me a pack of cigarettes and I’ll sit down right here with you and tell you all kinds of crazy stuff about them,” he said.
And just like that, the talk was back to the Rhodens.
But some Americans bravely elected the first negro as president.
Exactly. Appalachian communities have historically managed ways to resolve problems when more effete society was unable to do so.
The enemy is the Progressive mindset, at the forefront being the entitlement and victim mentality, a form of pathological psychology. Hell, I see it all the time here in the Akron region of Ohio. The colloquial term is wigger. Like it or not, there are more and more every single day!
BY CHOICE.
I see them all over northeast Florida. Neck, wrist and knuckle tats, rotten teeth, shirtless, unemployable except as occasional under the table laborers. They drink Steel Reserve and smoke 305s. They ask for "gas money" in the Walmart parking lot. Their kids go to school with my kids and my kids come home with notes that "lice was found on a student in class today" and parents need to inspect our kids to make sure it didn't spread.
Drug-addled, dysfunctional losers.
Kevin Williamson wrote a scathing article in National Review about this demographic but failed when he then tried to paint them as working class Trump voters.
B)All the more reason there might not be so much love for the slain family.
I realize that. Sometimes it is a case of pot calling kettle black.
It reminds me of a local case from years back. There was a small circle of party animals who caroused together regularly. Eventually, there was a car accident and one young man was killed. Horrific. Well, the young man who died was the drunk driver as often as any of the others, just never got caught and not on that fateful night.
An interesting theory. In fact, the sheriff in charge originally said, in twenty years there had never been a LE issue with this family. I found that to be a little odd, since the men in the family were always getting into fights with other locals. The cockfighting operation appears to be very close to the road and would be hard to miss. Also read that they were hard workers and active in community affairs. So who knows.....one interesting tidbit is that the youngest victim, sixteen, had been the target of a road rage incident. It seems a woman driver, 33, went after the boy. Slapped him around pretty badly, left bruises and charges were brought against the woman. The boy’s mother who is a victim also was active in getting the woman arrested. Two days before the murder the woman was given one year probation and not to go near the family.
He would be the first person I'd want to rule out.
I haven’t heard a word about him and that was my first suspicion. I thought it too coincidental that an infant had been born just four days before a family is wiped out. Thought maybe the Rhoden men had gone after the father and prevented him from being with the mother and baby. But now that money was thrown over one of the men’s body, it sounds improbable. I read that two of the three children are in child protective custody and this infant is one of them. There is a father, as there was a picture of him with the pregnant mother, wonder why he isn’t allowed to be with the baby.
Just tragic for those little ones.
In a rather small rural community such as this is, it is my experience that everyone knows what everyone else is doing or what they may be involved with. You can’t make me believe that LE didn’t know about who was the drug supplier in the community. Everybody knows the “go to guy”. Every body knows who the thieves are, which women are the sluts and who’s been cheating on who.
A diversion, maybe? DeWine did say something about the killer(s) deliberately hindering the investigation.
I thought that was a rather odd comment to make. I mean, what criminal doesn't try to hinder the investigation?
The folowing story tells me the sheriffs department has had some troubling deputies employed in the recent past.
PIKETON, Ohio – The sheriff’s department people are counting on to solve the massacre of eight family members here last week has had to investigate some of its own deputies for serious crimes in the past few years.
Since 2013, four deputies from the Pike County Sheriff’s Office have been involved in three separate incidents that resulted in criminal charges or resignations, according to our news partner, WBNS in Columbus.
And the Pike County Sheriff’s Office only employs 13 deputies.
What does that say about the sheriff’s department? Piketon resident Alan Newberry is familiar with the cases.
“You can think you know somebody and you check them out, but you don’t know the inner person as well as you think you do,” Newberry said.
Most recently, WBNS reported that Deputy Joel Jenkins was indicted in 2015 on five counts related to two fatal shootings — one at his home in December and another while on duty on a rural road in March.
Jenkins was charged with murder, reckless homicide, involuntary manslaughter, and tampering with evidence. He was fired.
The victims were 26-year-old Robert Rooker, a stranger, and 40-year-old Jason Brady, a neighbor.
The Columbus Dispatch reported that Rooker, who had spent a year in prison in 2009-10 for burglary and theft, was speeding and rammed two cruisers during a chase on March 28. His vehicle crashed on a dead-end road.
Another officer also fired at Rooker’s vehicle, but only Jenkins’ shots apparently hit Rooker.
Jenkins was suspended but later returned to work. In May, Sheriff Richard Henderson resigned and current Sheriff Charles Reader took over. Reader put Jenkins on administrative leave until he underwent treatment.
“He seemed to be doing fine,” Reader said.
Then came the Dec. 3 shooting at Jenkins’ house. Jenkins called to say he had accidentally shot Brady in head. Brady, a friend to many, used to feed and walk Jenkins’ police dog.
The first officers at the scene said it was clear that Jenkins had been drinking.
That case gained national attention because county prosecutor Rob Junk had lent Jenkins some of his guns for protection, the Dispatch reported.
In 2014, WBNS reported that Pike County deputies Phil Hopper and Paul Wheeler violently attacked Hopper’s 16-year-old stepson at their home. They weren’t charged but resigned.
Hopper’s wife said the deputies were drunk. The deputies claimed they were defending themselves against a violent, out-of-control teenager.
An independent Ross County Sheriff’s investigation found all three could have faced criminal charges.
Wheeler said the situation came to a head when Hopper ordered the teen to go in the house and the teen sucker-punched Hopper in the face.
“He started walking around toward Phil and when he walked past Phil he just turned around and jacked him,” Wheeler said. His fiancee supported his story.
But the 16-year-old, his mother, and his friend told a different story.
“I started to walk away when Phil yelled ‘march.’ I told them they were acting like jerks, then he grabbed me by the head and tried to put me on the ground,” the teen said.
His friend told investigators, “Phil grabbed (the teen) by the face and pulled him to the ground and then Wheeler and Phil were on top of him and Wheeler was holding him down kneeing (the teen) and Phil hitting (the teen).”
Hopper’s wife backed up that account:
“We just kept screaming, ‘Get off of him! Get off of him!’ and Wheeler was kicking him in the side. He had his knee down in him. Phil was punching him,” she said.
Residents say that incident doesn’t reflect upon the sheriff’s office.
“I think it’s just the individuals,” said Newberry. “Basically we got a good sheriff’s department - good men, good investigators - but things like that happen.”
In 2013, the Pike County News Watchman covered the case against former Chief Deputy Clyde Franklin, who pleaded no contest to gross sexual imposition.
In 2011, a grand jury charged him with engaging in sexual activity with a child under the age of 10. The crimes occurred between October 2008 and January 2009, according to the indictment.
Sanders was sentenced to five years of community control sanctions and ordered to register as a Tier 2 sex offender.
While the sheriff’s office continued its investigation into the Rhoden family murders on Thursday, Newberry and other residents defended Reader, who took over the sheriff’s post last year.
“Charlie didn’t have anything to do with (crimes by deputies). That was past tense,” Newberry said.
None of these deputies are implicated in the Rhoden case. WCPO wanted to know if the arrests point to general problems in the department.
The sheriff at the time of these incidents, Henderson, resigned last year.
We have reached out to both men for comment.
Yeah, that was really weird......I thought what an idiotic thing to say, possibly he meant used props to hide or hinder motive. I know this is terrible to say and will never happen, but the best thing that could happen to the infant and six month old baby, is that they be adopted and never know what their background was.
These were Americans, willing to work and not leave it to illegals to do./sar
Drug trafficking exists only where it is allowed by local law enforcement.
they'd go to church, send their kids to Catholic school...stay married but cheat constantly...
its hard to get your head around what they do especially killing so many but then you see these nice little Italian families, so loving....
in America today, our underclass, especially the white underclass, is screwed...totally screwed...their kids are not going to get scholarships, they will not get great jobs..
the money is going to the athletes, and their kids are not atheltes....
the rich continue to get richer...
and there is no justice and certainly no peace...
if you're a man with a family you might just think "screw them" (the govt) start doing your side businesses....
I can totally see why they do this...
and its going to continue....
Point is there are plenty around here who will scream about this sort of thing when it`s ‘those other kinds of people’ doing it, but where are those angry hand wringers now?
I always thought he was kidding affectionately until I actually went to Chillicothe, found Sugar Run, and discovered this article: The Hillicans.
Apparently the Hillicans were a bunch of degenerates back in the day, and they also lived in parts of Pike County. Sounds likes these people might also be Hillicans or their descendants.
Lash the users, hang the dealers.
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