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Inside Kohberger’s Last Power Play: Why He Won’t Pay the Families He Destroyed-WEEK IN REVIEW | Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski: True Crime Today | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: Inside Kohberger’s Last Power Play: Why He Won’t Pay the Families He Destroyed-WEEK IN REVIEW
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This content analyzes Brian Coburger's recent legal motion to avoid paying restitution, framing it not as a legal strategy but as a continuation of his pattern of cruelty, control, and manipulation aimed at the victims' families even after his conviction.
This is Hidden Killers Week in review.
>> A look back at the most prolific stories
of the week.
>> This is Hidden Killers with Tony Brussi.
There's a uh certain kind of cruelty
that doesn't come with a weapon. It's
quieter, colder. It shows up in court
filings and legal motions years after
the crime when the world has mostly
moved on. It's the kind of cruelty that
says, "I still get to control the narrative."
narrative."
Brian Cobberger has always been that
kind of cruel. Even now, sitting in a
maximum security cell for the rest of
his life, he's still trying to dictate
the terms of his own accountability. And
this time, he's doing it with what can
only be described as his final insult to
the families of the four young people he murdered.
murdered.
Let's get something straight up front.
Brian Coberger is not some sort of
misunderstood academic who lost his way.
He is a convicted killer. A man who
broke into an off-campus home on King
Road in Moscow, Idaho on November,
a late November night in 2022.
And he took the lives of four students,
Kaylee Gonzalez, Madison Mogan, Zenodal,
and Ethan Chapen.
He's not awaiting trial. He's not
alleged. He's guilty
and he's serving four consecutive life
sentences plus 10 years.
He's done. At least that's what most
people thought when the gavvel came down
this past July. But apparently Brian
Cobberger wasn't done because just
recently through his defense attorneys
in early October of 25, he filed a new
motion that left just about everyone,
especially the victim's families, kind
of stunned. In it, he argues that he
shouldn't have to pay the restitution
ordered by the court because the
families of his victims receive
Think about it for a second. The man who
destroyed four families now wants to
avoid paying them because other people
There isn't a clerical issue.
It's not some minor legal technicality.
It's psychological. It's about power.
Even behind bars, Coberger is still
grasping for control, trying to reduce
what happened to a math problem. If
strangers on the internet raise money to
help these grieving parents travel to
hearings, he says, then his debt is
somehow erased.
That's not legal logic. That's
It's And look, these families, they're
not looking for a payday. They're fully
expecting never to see the money come through
through
cuz he doesn't have it. But the fact
that this argument is even being made
that he would go to court and say, "You
know what? You don't deserve it because
It seems maybe some more cantens in that
prison need to be filled to extinguish
the monster.
A normal document like this
would lay it out very plainly. It would
say something to the effect of he's
indigent. He can't
anything that that he does accumulate if
anything over time in prison. Yes, it
will go to that. But no, this is this is
basically kind of protecting his canteen
to a certain extent as well, cuz that
can be pilered out if money were to
happen to go into it.
The court documents laid out plainly.
His defense claims the additional funds
sought by prosecutors do not qualify as
an economic loss under Idaho law because
the families received extensive funds
through multiple GoFundMe campaigns.
In other words, they got help. so they
don't need justice. His lawyers also
argued he has no ability now or in the
future to pay restitution since he'll
spend the rest of his life in prison.
That part might be true. But here's the
thing. Restitution isn't about whether
you can pay today. It's about the
acknowledgment that you owe.
It's symbolic as much as it is
financial. It's the court's way of
saying you took something, you owe
something. But Coberger, of course,
It's the same pattern that's followed
him since the start of this case.
Probably since the start of his life, really.
really.
When the murders happened, investigators
described the attack as one of the most
methodical, cold, and deliberate crimes
they've ever seen. There was nothing
impulsive about it. It was planned. It
was calculated. every move, every moment
mapped out in the mind that believed
itself smarter than everyone else.
Coberger wasn't driven by emotion. He
was driven by control. And that's
exactly what this new filing represents.
A man still refusing to give up control,
even when it no longer matters.
To understand just how absurd this
motion is, you have to look at what the
families have already endured. Since
November of 2022, they've lived every
parents nightmare in full public view.
They've sat through hearings, press
conferences, and months of online
speculation about the case. When the
trial was moved across the state to
Boise at Coberger's own request, mind you,
you,
they had to uproot their lives just to
be there.
That meant flights, hotels, missed work,
the kind of financial and emotional
exhaustion most of us can't even
imagine. The GoFundMe campaigns weren't
luxuries. They were survival tools, you
piece of They were the public
saying, "You shouldn't have to face this alone."
alone."
The Gonzaleves family raised around $85,000.
$85,000.
There was even a joint campaign that
brought in more money to help cover
travel and accommodations. That money
didn't erase their suffering. It barely
covered the cost of showing up to
witness it. And when Coberger struck a
plea deal in July that spared him from
the death penalty, the Gonzalez family
announced they'd returned what remained
of the funds, saying they no longer
needed them since the trial would not go forward.
forward.
They showed honor and decency.
in that one gesture than Cobberger has
shown in his entire life.
And yet here he is filing paperwork from
a prison cell to say that they'd been
helped enough.
Can we just give him like a really long
a bed sheet, a rope, a knife, things he
can self-destruct himself with and call
it a day? Let's stop putting him on watch.
watch.
Let's just put them on encourage here.
I think we could use that in our prison
system a little bit more. Lock somebody
in a cage and don't watch don't put them
on a watch to prevent them from taking
themselves out. Put them in a system
that encourages it because why why is he
alive? So he can do this torture to
other families to to the families that
he has already tortured enough.
So he can waste everyone's time and
money and energy where they could be
doing other things in their lives,
virtually anything, watching paint dry,
grass grow, anything far more important
than giving this piece of one more
This man is still trying to convince
himself that the system owes him
something because that's what
narcissists do. They don't apologize.
They reframe. They twist. They rewrite
the story until they're the victim of
it. Let's put him and Donna Adlesen in a
cell together and see what happens.
Put on a little Barry Manalo.
>> Hey, Donna, come on over here. It's bri.
>> I could see that going down.
When Judge Steven Hitler sentenced
Goberger, he ordered him to pay over a
quarter million in state fines plus
$20,000 in civil judgments for each
family and nearly 29,000 to reimburse
funeral expenses through the Idaho Crime
Victim Compensation Fund. That
restitution wasn't a request. It was
part of the consequence. It wasn't a
tangible part of the justice process.
The acknowledgement that these families
lost everything. The state later filed
an additional $20,49
for Steven Christy Gonzaleves and
another $6,920 for Madison Mogan's
mother, Karen Laramie. Those additional
costs were for travel, lodging, and the
urns that now hold the ashes of the two
best friends who should have been alive
to see their college graduation. It's
not extravagant,
it's heartbreaking.
And Coberger's response
essentially not my problem
that finally makes it clear that he
doesn't just want to avoid paying. He
wants to erase any symbolic
acknowledgement of the harm he caused.
He waved his right to appear at the
hearing on the matter. No apology, no
explanation, just another legal document
filed by a man who treats empathy like
it's beneath him. Psychologically,
Psychologically,
it is textbook.
The narcissist offender's greatest fear
isn't punishments, its irrelevance. The
moment the trial ended, Coberger stopped
being the center of attention. He went
from the suspect everyone's talking
about to the inmate nobody's watching.
This filing puts him back in that
spotlight, if only for a moment. It's
control through chaos. He can't control
his environment anymore, but he can
still manipulate the narrative.
And that's what this motion is, a
performance of self-pity disguised as
legal argument.
Inside the prison, reports say he's
already been filing complaints about
other inmates, about conditions, about
treatment. It's the same personality
trait that defined him outside those
walls. Grievance, the constant belief
that the world is out to get him, that
he's the smartest guy in the room and
everyone else just doesn't get it. When
you strip you strip away his degrees and
his courtroom composure, that's what's
left. A deeply insecure boy hiding
behind prosecutourial language.
He was in bureaucracy the same way he
once used his criminology studies to
feel superior. Meanwhile, the families
he's targeted with this motion have been
living with the fallout in real time.
They've had to bury their children,
endure public scrutiny, and relive the
worst days of their lives every time his
name hits the news. And now they're
being asked to justify why the
generosity of strangers doesn't cancel
out what he owes them.
It's retraumatization by legal proxy.
You can see the emotional whiplash in
their statements. The Gonzaleves family
recently shared that both Kaye and
Madison were finally transferred into
their urns. A moment they described as
happy and sad.
They said the girls will never be apart,
that they'll always be together in their
two homes, just like they were growing
up. That's where the energy is. Love,
remembrance, connection.
Then there's Coberger arguing over
dollars and decimals.
It's a contrast that tells you
everything about who these people are.
At its core, this isn't about money.
It's about moral responsibility. The
restitution order was never going to fix
what he did. It wasn't supposed to. It's
symbolic. A small but critical
acknowledgement that when you destroy
lives, you owe something in return. You
don't get to walk away clean because the
internet was kind to your victims. And
yet, that's exactly what Cobberger's
defense is doing. that kindness from
others should somehow erase
accountability for the killer.
It's not just offensive, it's
psychologically revealing.
Because to the narcissist,
any act of grandiosity towards others
feels like a personal attack. It reminds
them that they're not the center of
compassion. They're the reason
compassion had to exist in the first place.
place.
Legally speaking, the motion probably
won't go far. Our Idaho's restitution
laws give judges wide discretion to
decide what qualifies as an economic
loss. But the damage isn't in the
outcome. It's in the act itself. The
decision to make these families fight
one more time. To drag them back to a
courtroom, to make them hear his name
again, to force them to confront the
fact that he's still out there, still
manipulating, still trying to exert
control from behind a locked door.
That's what narcissistic offenders do
when their physical control is gone.
They weaponize procedure. They become
experts in wasting time. They know they
can't win, but they can still make
everyone else lose a little more peace.
It's the same psychological framework
that defined Coberger's crimes. When he
couldn't belong, he destroyed. When he
couldn't control others, he punished
them. Now that he can't move freely, he
finds control in the only way left
through paperwork, filings, motions.
Each one a little reminder that he still exists.
exists.
It's easy to dismiss this as a
meaningless stunt, but for the families,
it's not meaningless. It's a reminder
that justice doesn't end with a
sentence. It drags on in the slow grind
of bureaucracy. in the small cruelties
of a legal motion like this one. They
already had to fight to get to this
point, to see him convicted, to hear the
words life without parole.
Now they have to fight again just to
hold on to what's already been ordered.
And for what? For a man who refuses to
face what he did, who refuses to speak
at sentencing, who's never once
expressed remorse, who seems
constitutionally incapable of
understanding that accountability isn't optional.
optional.
That's what makes this so infuriating. Infuriating.
Infuriating.
Not just the legal audacity, but the
psychological emptiness behind it. Coer
doesn't feel shame. He feels slighted.
In his mind, he's the one being wronged,
forced to pay for something that's
already taken care of. It's the same
lack of empathy that drove him. The
night of the murders, different setting,
same disease.
In the end, this filing tells us
something important. not about the law,
but about the man. Even in prison,
stripped of freedom and status, Coberger
is still revealing who he really is.
He's a thing. He's not a person. He's a
thing who can't tolerate the idea of
others reclaiming power. He can't stand
in a world moved on without him. The
families have found community and
strength that people donated to them out
of compassion. So he tries to weaponize
that compassion to turn it against them
to make it somehow invalid because if he
can do that even for a second then he's
back in control and that's his real
currency not money but manipulation.
But here's the real truth.
His control is gone.
He can file all the motions he wants,
but he's never getting out of that cell.
The world isn't bending to his will
anymore. The only thing he controls now
is the illusion that he still matters
and that every motion he files makes
that illusion a little thinner, a little
sadder, a little more transparent.
And we'll keep watching him. We'll keep
watching him till the day that shiv
lands in his brain.
The families, meanwhile, will keep doing
what they've done since that November
night, showing up, supporting each
other, living their lives in defiance of
what he tried to destroy. Because their
strength doesn't come from GoFundMe, it
comes from love. And that's something
Brian Cobberger will never understand.
He may have studied criminal psychology,
but he never learned the most basic
truth of it. Real accountability isn't
about the law. It's about the soul.
And in that sense, his life sentence
started long before he stepped into a courtroom.
courtroom.
What's left to Brian Cobberger is a
stack of paper and a hollow argument.
The people he hurt will go on living.
He'll keep filing. That's the difference
between the living and the dead. Between
those who move forward and those who are
forever stuck in the moment they decided
to destroy everything good around them.
And maybe that's the only kind of
justice he's capable of understanding.
Now, the slow, quiet realization that
the world no longer cares what Brian
Cobberger wants.
Give me your thoughts in the comments
section on YouTube. Search hitting
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