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This is Hidden Killers with Tony Brusky.
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Here now, Tony Brusky.
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Brain Cobrager grew up in a small town in Monroe County, Pennsylvania.
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Chestnut Hill Township, I should be.
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The kind of place where everybody knows everybody, which sounds nice until you're the kid,
3:00
that everybody knows that nobody really wants to spend time with.
3:08
He was by multiple accounts bullied through his school years and not in the loud dramatic
3:14
way that gets noticed and addressed and turned into an assembly about kindness.
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In the quiet, daily grinding way, the way where nobody does anything specific enough
3:27
to get in trouble for, but everybody understands the rules.
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And the rules say this kid doesn't belong here.
3:41
Because here's what happens when a kid spends years being told not in words, but in every
3:47
small social signal available to children who are very good at this that he doesn't belong.
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That there's something wrong with him, but the room he just walked into was fine until
4:03
He stops trying to fix it out right away.
4:08
He pays attention to what's working for other kids and tries to replicate it.
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He reaches and gets back nothing and reaches again because his hope is still alive.
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He still believes that the right year is coming that somewhere out there is a room where
4:23
the math works out differently, but the right year doesn't come.
4:29
At some point, the nervous system makes a decision that the conscious mind doesn't authorize.
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Wanting something you consistently can't have starts to cost you more than just not
4:44
So the system stops reaching, starts protecting instead, starts building something interior,
4:51
something private, something that doesn't require anyone else's participation to exist.
4:57
Because out there has never been safe enough to actually live in.
5:05
We're going to break this down into no ways.
5:07
Is this an excuse for Brian Cobrager to make you feel sympathy for him for anything?
5:14
But if we're going to be intellectually honest about this case and everything that's
5:17
gone on with it, we have to be intellectually honest about what built the person that
5:21
perpetrated the crime.
5:24
And we have to look at it as more than just, he was icky, he was weird, he was kind of
5:29
Yeah, he was all of those things.
5:32
Let's talk about the environment that he grew up in.
5:36
Let's talk about how kids treat one another.
5:41
And in no way am I saying here, because everyone wants to jump onto that area that will
5:45
It's not the fault of him being bullied that he turned it, no, it's not.
5:50
But there is death by a thousand cuts.
5:51
And sometimes a personality like Cobrager, if he gets a thousand cuts over here, turns
5:55
into something very monstrous over there.
5:58
Whether anyone wants to admit it or not, there can be cause and effect in these sort
6:02
Does it mean that those kids are bullying newies going to do this?
6:07
But if we want to do better as a society, if we want less Brian Cobrager's out there
6:14
in the world, or people who are just a step or two away from becoming one, maybe we should
6:19
take a closer look at how we interact with one another and how we label people and how
6:23
we treat people and how we deal with things and how we deal with red flags, all of that.
6:27
What a wise idea, what a crazy thing to think about.
6:32
We should actually look at the behavior and environments in which we raise these people
6:36
and then go, hmm, but that didn't work out.
6:40
That rest should be failed.
6:44
And instead of everyone saying, we did our best.
6:47
See, this person didn't turn out that way, yeah, great.
6:53
And yes, there's a big piece of this where sometimes it is just, it's going to do
6:59
His brain's broken, things are wired the wrong way, and this was, was there any guardrails
7:03
that would eventually stop someone like Brian Cobrager?
7:07
I do not know the answer to that question, but let's, let's just, for the sake of the
7:12
argument, have the conversation and take a closer look at the pot at which he was
7:23
And then what was poured out?
7:29
Some kids who are in that sort of a situation where the exterior world, they, they just,
7:36
they don't find a way to belong in, they don't fit, it's not their jam.
7:41
I know I was one of them.
7:45
Some end up looking internally and some kids find something beautiful in there.
7:50
The interior world becomes their whole life.
7:54
They become writers, artists, high podcasters, people with a depth and originality that the
8:01
kids who always belong to every room they walked into never develop because they never
8:07
needed to, nor were they capable.
8:11
And some kids built something that hardens, that stops grieving what it lost out there.
8:20
And starts resenting it instead.
8:25
There's a difference between those two things and it matters enormously.
8:29
Grief says something is wrong with me.
8:32
Resetment says something is wrong with them.
8:36
And resentment when it takes root in someone who has spent years absorbing daily wordless
8:41
rejection doesn't announce itself.
8:44
It doesn't show up on a report.
8:46
It doesn't generate a call home from school.
8:49
It just quietly reorganizes the way a person sees the world, the way they move through
8:56
it, what they believe they're owed by it.
9:01
Nobody around Brian Cobrager appears to have caught that shift.
9:05
Or if they did, they didn't have the language for it or the tools to address it or the
9:09
authority to really do anything about it.
9:15
So the formation continued.
9:17
Now here's a part that doesn't get talked about enough.
9:19
The behaviors that come from years of this kind of pain are often the exact behaviors
9:24
that produce more of it.
9:28
A kid who has spent enough years on the outside doesn't walk into rooms the way other people
9:34
He's tense, scanning for threat because threat has been more reliable than welcome for
9:42
as long as he can remember.
9:46
Not because he's anything inherently broken about him, but because being natural and relaxed
9:51
in social situations requires a baseline of feeling safe and he has never had that baseline.
9:57
He's intense because the interior world, he's been building to survive and real and complex
10:04
and meaningful in meaningful ways that don't translate easily into casual surface conversation
10:10
with people who have always felt at home in those sort of rooms.
10:16
And those things make people uncomfortable, so they pull back, which deepens the isolation,
10:22
which reinforces everything he already believes about himself and about them.
10:29
Saying it's right, saying it is what it is, it makes him harder to reach.
10:37
There's plenty of people out there listening right now going, yeah, I can relate to
10:40
that, and they didn't murder people.
10:43
But they went through a childhood like this, or maybe they're still living a life like
10:47
this, even in adulthood.
10:51
A closed loop, no exit, and no single person inside it is a villain.
10:56
The people pulling back aren't cruel, they're just responding to something that makes them
11:03
And he isn't broken, he's responding to years of damage, the only way the damage taught
11:10
But the loop keeps returning, and nobody breaks it, and the formation keeps going.
11:16
At some point between his school years and adulthood, Cobrager lost a significant amount
11:20
of weight, rebuilt himself physically, reinvention, basically.
11:24
The transformation was dramatic enough that people who knew him before might not have recognized
11:30
I want you to think about what that kind of transformation usually means, not a gradual
11:38
A total exterior rebuild, the kind where the before and after look like two totally
11:43
different people, it means the inside felt unfixable, so he started on the outside, because
11:49
that was the project he could actually do.
11:52
Change what people see first, change the thing that has been wrong this whole time.
11:57
Maybe if the container looked different, what's inside gets treated differently.
12:05
It doesn't work that way.
12:06
The people around Cobrager, after the transformation still describe the same thing, the same texture,
12:12
the same quality, they couldn't put language to, the same low level pull to be somewhere else.
12:20
He built everything on the outside and people still felt it, still pulled back, still found
12:25
reasons to be on the other side of whatever he was standing, because the inside hadn't
12:32
It was still there, exactly where it had always been, doing exactly what it had been
12:36
doing since those years, in Monroe County, just wearing a different body, living in a
12:41
different state, carrying new credentials, same formation, same wall, same loop, and nobody
12:50
around him, not in Pennsylvania, not at the sales, not at Washington State had anything
12:55
adequate to address it.
12:59
I'll talk to the moms right now, because I know who's listening to this.
13:07
I know some of you are listening to this while thinking about your own kid.
13:11
Maybe you are that kid listening to this and watching this.
13:15
When it comes home, a little quieter every year, not dramatically, not in a way that generates
13:20
phone calls or emergency meetings or anything that qualifies as a crisis requiring action,
13:26
incrementally, steadily quieter.
13:31
The story of some school getting shorter, the friends mentioned less frequently, the
13:34
door to the bedroom closing earlier in the evening.
13:40
You've reached for them and felt something that is in hostility and isn't quite distance,
13:45
but is the specific experience of someone who stopped expecting that other people reaching
13:52
in is going to change anything.
13:56
So they've stopped leaving that door open, not as punishment, just as protection.
14:01
You told yourself it's a phase, adolescence is hard for everyone, they'll find their
14:06
people, you found yours eventually, they will too.
14:12
And there's a quieter voice underneath that one that has been asking questions about
14:16
that explanation for longer than you want to sit with directly.
14:23
First thing, you are not failing.
14:26
Second thing, and it's harder to hear, the tools available to you for this specific situation,
14:30
the systems, the institutions, the clinical frameworks are genuinely not built for what
14:36
There is no mechanism that catches a child who is hardening instead of acting out.
14:43
Nothing doesn't look like a problem, it doesn't generate an incident, it doesn't qualify
14:48
for intervention under any framework that currently exists.
14:52
From the outside, it just looks like a quiet kid, a loner, maybe a little intense, probably
15:00
And there's no prescription for belonging, there's no clinical protocol for what years
15:05
of constant social rejection does to a child's nervous system.
15:08
There's no surgery that goes in and removes the accumulated weight of being the kid nobody
15:15
Year after year, in the years, when everything about who you are and whether you're worth
15:22
knowing gets established, there is just you across the dinner table, trying every door
15:29
you can think of feeling the wall, telling yourself, it's probably fine.
15:38
Keep the door open even when they stop walking through it?
15:43
Not because they'll use it right now, because knowing it's there matters even when they're
15:51
Say what you see without making it a verdict.
15:53
Not what's wrong with you, but I see you, I notice you're carrying something, I'm here
15:59
when you want to talk about it, get them support, not because you believe they're dangerous,
16:05
but because they're in pain.
16:06
And quiet pain still does damage whether it makes noise or not.
16:11
Release the idea that your love alone should fix this.
16:16
Your love matters more than you know, but this wound needs more than love to reach.
16:21
Leading help is not failing your child, it's being honest about the scale of what this
16:30
Most kids who walk this road don't end up, we're Brian Cobrager ended up.
16:36
That needs to be said clearly and kept in front of us.
16:38
Most of them become adults who carry the weight of those years in the way they trust and
16:43
connect and move through the world quietly, sometimes painfully, sometimes they turn
16:48
podcasts out that talk about life and the experiences and they have an uncanny way of relating
16:56
to the stories they are sharing.
16:59
They live their lives and they love people, but no one ever gets hurt.
17:07
They figured out ways to continue in life without going to the dark side.
17:15
Not everybody does though.
17:17
The retrospective story around a case like this, flattens all of that, makes everything
17:23
feel premeditated, makes the outcome feel like it was always the only possible outcome
17:27
for a kid who looked like this, who moved through the world like this, who gave people
17:34
The people around him weren't equipped to see where the road was going.
17:38
Not because they weren't paying attention because the resources for this, the actual practical
17:42
tools for interrupting the slow-quiet formation of a defeated self and a child who is in pain
17:48
but not acting out don't really exist.
17:52
We respond to incidents.
17:54
We don't respond to the years before the incident when the shape is being built.
17:58
That's not a failure, not yours, not its families.
18:01
It's a collective one, a structural one.
18:04
One that belongs to all of us.
18:07
The shape he took was built in a gap between what he needed and what existed to give it
18:16
That gap is not unique to Brian Coburger.
18:19
It's in living rooms right now, at dinner tables right now, in the bedrooms of kids coming
18:24
home a little quieter every day.
18:27
While the people who love them try every door they know to keep hitting a wall.
18:34
Those families deserve better tools than they have and those kids deserve someone who
18:39
knows where the door is.
18:42
Even after the kid has stopped leaving one open.
18:47
I hope this made you think and maybe relate, giving your thoughts in the comments section
18:52
on substacking YouTube.
18:54
I hope to continue the conversation there.
18:57
Wherever you're at, press subscribe so you don't miss any of our coverage of this and
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the medications we follow for you, right here.
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Until next time, I'm Tony Bursky, we'll talk again real soon.
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