The lesson? Choose your friends & fiancee wisely.
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 On Thursday, Ruby rescinded the offer due to “recent complex criminal developments,” he tweeted.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.
The Rhodens were what is commonly referred to as trailer trash. They even lived in a trailer! The girlfriend would have just birthed a litter of more loafers and drug dealers.
It's too bad that America has a permanent underclass that does nothing but drag the nation down into their sewer.
No. Not if they were dealing drugs. My family was poor too, but they never did anything illegal. They just lived within their means and made the best of things.
If she was engaged to a Rhoden, then she would have been a Rhoden in the near future. It’s unfortunate that she got mixed up in that family.
I really get tired of the meme “they deserve [fill in the blank]” It derives from old french and has to do with service. In what way did these people serve their community, their country, their fellow human beings?
The name would be more correct if spelled thusly:
Rhodent
The more we read about the drugs that drag a culture into the sewer the more some of us wish we had a drug law like Singapore!
Selling or using drugs results in execution.
And according to the county law enforcement, none of the Rhodens had ever been in trouble with the law. That kind of tells me this incident goes way deeper than originally described. Think of this scenario. Cops knock on the door and are greeted by the people that live there. Are told at the point of a gun to go back and lay in bed and as soon as they do are shot in the head. Might look as if they were shot while sleeping but would explain entry into the house by the killers.
The lesson? Choose your friends & fiancee wisely.
Ok… so the Rhodens were despicable trailer trash. This does not detract from the fact that those who executed them are also despicable varmints who need to be eradicated.
Of course the murdering drug dealers should be eliminated.
Scrapping capital punishment in favor of warehousing tattooed monsters was a very bad idea. It should be brought back and implemented in perpetuity. Further, the reasons for its application need broadening.
I hope the murdered's souls all rest in peace.
Not in defense of drug trafficking but this rural Applachian area of Ohio has been decimated with the drug trade and has secretly become a major player. First of all, it is the poorest region of Ohio, and not much opportunity. Where have the states leaders been, they know what is going on, there are signs posted for havens sake, so why not make it priority one? Secondly, the three little children lost their grandparents and their parents, can we have some mercy for them?
It had to be someone known to both the family and the dogs.
Personally, I suspect Wynn Duffy
Maybe not. I am thinking along the lines of LE wanting a bigger share of the profits under the threat of being busted for the drugs. Rhodens tell them they won’t and if they go down than LE is going down with them. To me it looks like all witnesses had to be eliminated or they were going to be exposed. This could have been easily planned by a couple of dishonest deputies.
Could be, but IMHo, if anything like your theory is correct there's a lawyer in the mix somewhere. Dead yet, or not.
It is pretty obvious the good morals train has left the station in vast swaths of this country. In a few years, nobody will recognize us from Mexico or any other lovely rathole in Central America.
I doubt that.
All the more reason there might not be so much love for the slain family.
Wynn
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