The Eye-opening Case Of Cosmo Dinardo (Are parents responsible for crimes of a mentally ill child?)

Cosmo dinardo, a young man from Pennsylvania, had severe mental health problems. And ultimately in 2017, he and his cousin were responsible for the deaths of four other young men in what turned out to be a very horrifying, bone chilling, cold blooded killing spree. But the reason that I'm talking about this isn't so much to report on the crime that happened, although I'm going to give you a recap of it. What we're going to take a look at today is we're going to try to analyze who really is to blame for these murders. Was it Cosmo? Was it the mental health system which severely failed the DiNardo family? Was it Cosmo's psychiatrist who had just taken him off of his medications right before this happened? Or was it Cosmo's mother? He used her gun to actually commit these murders. This is a really complicated case where many, many, many things went wrong. And I think there's a lot to learn if we'll slow down, take a look at this, dissect it piece by piece and try to figure out what went wrong. Are any of things preventable and are there any lessons to be learned here? So if you're new here, welcome to Put the Shovel Down. I'm Amber Hollingsworth, and this channel is really all about helping you understand the science and psychology of addiction so that you're always five steps ahead of it and you can get your life and your family back on track. Now, occasionally we cover one of these true crime cases because it can be really helpful to analyze the psychology of why things happen the way they happen. Now, I first became aware of the Cosmo DiNardo case from another YouTube channel called that Chapter. Now, I watch almost all of this channel's videos, which are done by a guy named Mike. I'm going to put a link in the description and at the end of this video to that chapter's version of this story, because Mike can tell it to you in a lot more detail and he's just a better storyteller in general than I am. But just in case you're not familiar, here's the quick rundown with what happened in the Cosmo DiNardo case. So Cosmo DiNardo grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He came from a good family and a family that had some resources. The dinardo family had been long standing business people and helpful citizens of this community long before these events took place. So what in the world could have went wrong? Well, early on, everything was great. Cosmo was a good student. He made straight A's he went to a private elementary school. He played football in high school. Now, he did suffer from a few concussions related to that football. Be important to this case, so just hang on to that little piece of information. And he did get into a little trouble here and there, but when you look at it, doesn't look like anything too terribly awful. Definitely never got arrested and taken to jail. Mostly pretty typical teenage type things. I believe it was in 2015, he and a longtime girlfriend broke up, and that was really tough on him. And he did suffer a major depressive episode after that. But in 2016, everything changed. He actually got into a pretty serious ATD accident, broke a bunch of bones, was pinned under the atv, and from what I could investigate, he was trapped and not found for about a day and a half. But more than the broken bones, the most serious injury was a major head injury that caused a brain bleed. It was after this incident that Cosmo's family really started to notice like severe changes in his personality. He became aggressive, he had no impulse control at times, he was very paranoid, he was violent with his mother, and he had been hospitalized even involuntarily multiple times leading up to these crimes. Now you might be wondering, what does the head injury have to do with any of this stuff? Head injuries, depending on where they are, can cause major changes in a person, even if that person had never had any kind of mental health or addiction issues. Prior frontal lobe injuries, that's this front part of your brain, can result in inability to control impulses. If you get an injury on the left side of your brain, you have more of a tendency towards aggression. You can have difficulty reading social cues, you can misinterpret non threatening events as threatening. It really can be like almost overnight, someone can be a completely different person. And unfortunately, that is exactly what happened to the DiNardo family. About a month after his ATV incident, his mother started noticing these severe changes. In fact, at one point, she had him in the car, was driving him to the hospital to try to get him to sign himself involuntarily, he became violent with her, bit her, hit her, jumped out of the car, tried to escape, was paranoid, said he was being kidnapped. I mean, it was a big scene. She took him to more than 10 psychiatrists, and at one point she was so desperate she called in a priest to try and have an exorcism done. And that incident actually ended up with the priest running out of the house and being sick on the front lawn. So as you can see, this mom desperately tried to get help for her son, but she ran into roadblock after roadblock. Most of his hospitalizations were short term. He wasn't there long. He was in and then released. And so you're probably wondering, why in the world could that happen? If you've got a young man who's violent, who's said violent things, threatened violent things, acted out violently and aggressively, has shown paranoia symptoms, why in the world would he be released from the psych hospital? Well, it's a pretty complicated subject. In order to be committed involuntarily against your will to a psychiatric facility, it has to be shown that you are an imminent threat and danger to yourself or others. Now clearly, in the incident that I just described a while ago where Cosmo became violent with his mom in the car, that's a clear demonstration of threat to self and others. And so, yes, he did meet the criteria for involuntary hospitalization. But that hospitalization, that involuntary commitment, is not open ended. In fact, here in South Carolina, the way that works is most people are kept about five business days to be evaluated. At that point, a doctor, a nurse, a counselor, it's usually people will evaluate the person to try and assess whether or not they are still a danger to themselves or others. Most of the time, by the time you get five days out, people are somewhat stabilized. I worked in a psych hospital for like 10 years and I actually had to do these designated examinations pretty much every week. And almost all of them were stabilized once they were in the hospital. Unless they're telling you that they're going to hurt themselves or other people are acting so out of control that you can prove that they're a danger to themselves or others imminently, then the judge is usually going to have to release them. Now, I know that's frustrating. I've been frustrated with myself and I've worked with countless desperate families that have been stuck in this situation. But it's this delicate balance between wanting to protect people and human rights. But to be honest, a lot of people with severe mental health issues end up coming in and out, in and out, in and out of these acute care, which means short term hospital type settings, which is really counterproductive when they have long term chronic problems which are probably not going to be solved. They may get stable, but likely for only very short periods of time. There are hundreds of thousands of families out there right now dealing with this. Because a lot of severe psychiatric mental illness involves the person that does not realize that they are ill, that does not realize that they need to take a medication. And when it Comes to addiction, it's even more complicated. So let's add that layer on top of this Cosmo DiNardo case, because in addition to all these hospitalizations in which he ended up being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, schizoaffective disorder, and schizophrenia, you've probably heard of schizophrenia, and you've probably heard of bipolar disorder, but you may not have heard of schizoaffective disorder. The best way I can describe it to you is it's kind of a combination between schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. You can have the psychosis and some of those schizophrenia type symptoms mixed with the mood symptoms of the bipolar disorder. Now, on top of all that, Cosmo DiNardo was also using drugs. And the drug particularly named in the records is that he was using a drug called, called K2, or sometimes called Spice, which is synthetic marijuana. Now, this drug, although similar to marijuana, has a very different effect. It frequently causes psychosis, paranoia, hallucinations, delusions. I personally have seen many, many, many, many young people have to be hospitalized from the use of this drug. Fortunately, I don't hear about this drug being used much anymore, But a few years ago, it was rampant. So you've got somebody with a head injury, who's been hospitalized times, in and out of the psych hospital, who's diagnosed with mental illness that involves psychosis, psychotic features, delusions, and paranoia, who is then adding on the top of that a drug that causes psychosis, delusions, paranoia. As you can see, this is just one problem layered on top of another. Layered on top of another. Now, not Only was Cosmo DiNardo in and out of the psychiatric hospital, but he was actually arrested a couple of times before he was arrested for the deaths of the four young men. He had been picked up on a gun violation because he was found in his vehicle with a weapon and ammunition, which is not allowable. If you've ever had an involuntary hospitalization, you lose the right to own and possess firearms. So he was picked up and taken into jail, but because of a paperwork issue, he was let go. Then the first young man goes missing, and there's this entire police investigation, and they're trying to find out who did it. And the evidence seems to be pointing in the direction of Cosmo DiNardo. One giant piece of evidence was that they found the missing young man's vehicle on the DiNardo property, but they didn't have enough evidence to arrest him for that. So they pulled up this old gun charge and had him brought back in for that. And they were holding him, I think, in an attempt to try to hold him there long enough to get enough evidence to charge him with the crime associated with the missing young man. At the time, however, his bond was set for a million dollars, and his family bail him out for 10% of that, which was $100,000. And it was after this particular arrest that cosmo and his cousin went on to kill the other three young men. So in every one of these situations, Cosmo and his cousin had set up to sell marijuana to these young men. But once they got the young men back to the dinardo property, they killed them. Ultimately, the police did gather enough evidence that cosmo had something to do with these missing young men, and they were able to arrest him in connection to those crimes. Pretty quickly, Cosmo and cousin confessed. And I'm going to put a link in the description. You can hear a video that has excerpts of those confessions, But I'm going to warn you, they're very cold and chilling and extremely difficult to listen to. Both cosmo and his cousin Sean were convicted for these crimes, but that's not where this story ends, because after that, the families of these deceased young men came back with a wrongful death lawsuit against the dinardo parent, claiming that more should have been done to keep the community safe, Particularly as it relates to the firearm that were used in these killings. It belonged to Cosmo's mother. And the complication here is that pretty much anytime you get involuntarily committed, or even just you're leaving the psychiatric hospital for reasons associated with safety, you're gonna get a call from someone at that facility before the person's discharged, asking the family to make sure that there are no weapons in the home. And it's not that his parents completely ignored this request. His mother actually got all the weapons out of the home except for the one that was used in these murders. And the saddest part about it is, she says in one of her statements that she kept it there for protection against cosmo because she was worried for her safety at times, but she didn't realize that Cosmo knew that the gun was actually there or where it was. So the families of the young men are suing the dinardo family, and the dinardo family is suing the psychiatrist who, just prior to all this happening, had taken Cosmo off of his medication and indicated that his bipolar disorder was in full remission. And you might be thinking, why in the world would he have done that? Well, I don't really know, and I couldn't find a lot of records about that issue. But I could speculate a couple of things. One, maybe the psychiatrist was just completely negligent and incompetent or just didn't care what happened. But I doubt that that's the case. When it comes to mental health, you really have to go on what the patient or client tells you. And if the patient or client seems to have good judgment and can speak to you logically and they're telling you things are better, that they're not having the bad thoughts anymore. In addition to that, Cosmo's mother had said that he did seem better just prior to all this was happening. So it could have been that she may have even been giving positive reports as well. Or the psychiatrist could have been thinking that the psychosis, the paranoia and all that was mostly related to the substance use. And so he could have been thinking that, okay, now that the substances are out of the picture, we're okay. I don't want to be putting this young man on all these psychiatric meds when maybe it was related to the substance use, because it can be what's called substance induced psychosis. Now, speaking about the K2 or Spice drug, as you can see, there were many things that went wrong. Who do you think was responsible or what combination of events do you think caused this to happen? Was it completely Cosmo DiNardo? Did he have enough control over his abs actions to be held responsible for this? Was it the mental health system or was it his parents who maybe enabled him too much? I definitely want to hear your thoughts on the topic. Now, thankfully, in most cases, things don't usually turn out quite this terrible. But I can promise you there are many, like I said, hundreds of thousands of families who feel stuck in a situation where they have an unwell family member and they feel completely held hostage. They feel like there's nowhere to turn, they can't get help anywhere. Because like I said, unless you can show that someone is an imminent threat or danger to themselves or others, you can't force them into treatment. You can't force them to take their medicine, you can't even force them to go to their doctor's appointments.