SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — A parenting advice YouTuber's malnourished and severely bruised son is shown in a newly released video on the day a mother and her business partner were arrested on child abuse charges. politely asks the person to take him to the nearest police station. Southern Utah.
My 12 year old son is ruby franke A mother of six who advised millions through her popular YouTube channel fled through a window and ran into several nearby houses until someone answered the door, according to documents released Friday by the Washington County Attorney's Office. He said he was getting closer to home.
A month later, crime scene photos, body camera video and interrogation tapes of Franke and his business partner were released. Jody Hildebrandt, a mental health counselor, each was sentenced to up to 30 years in prison. Washington County Attorney Eric Clark announced Friday that a police investigation revealed religious extremism was the motive behind the women's horrific abuse of Franke's children.
“The women seemed to fully believe that the abuse they inflicted was necessary in order to teach their children how to properly repent of their imaginary 'sins' and rid their bodies of evil spirits,” Clark said. he said.
Franke (42 years old) and Hildebrand (54 years old) plead guilty Clark is charged with four counts of aggravated child abuse, including making Franke's two youngest children believe they were evil and subjecting them to “concentration camp-like” conditions, including physical labor and days of fasting. It is being said.
The women, who claim to belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, were at Hildebrandt's home in the picturesque Ivins suburb of St. George last August when neighbor Danny Clarkson opened the front door and saw an emaciated woman. He was discovered and arrested. boy. Their actions have been criticized by other Mormon parenting bloggers for misrepresenting their community and religion.
In the video, the boy is seen leaving without shoes, wearing torn socks and with bloody duct tape and plastic wrap around his ankles, when Clarkson answers the door. I turned back. Ring cameras showed him and his wife, Debi, feeding the child and calling 911 to ask about the lacerations on his ankle and wrist, which the boy blamed on himself. he claimed.
“It's my fault that you got these scars,'' the boy tells the couple, with a worried look on his face. He told paramedics that his sister was still at Hildebrandt's home, and police rushed to the home.
The boy later told investigators that Hildebrandt used rope to tie his arms and legs to weights in the ground. She used a mixture of cayenne pepper and honey to dress her wounds, according to a police report. He had been told by Franke and Hildebrand that everything he did to him was an act of love.
In a handwritten diary also released Friday, Franke describes months of starving her son and 9-year-old daughter, forcing them to work for hours in the summer heat and isolating them from the outside world. It records daily abuse over a period of time. The women often forced their children to sleep on the hard floor, sometimes locking them in concrete bunkers in Hildebrand's basement.
Franke repeatedly claims in his diary that his son is possessed by a demon. In a July 2023 entry titled “Big Day for Evil,” she described immersing the boy's head in water and covering his mouth and nose with his hands. Franke will tell her that the devil is lying and hurting her, but she tells him that he is actually trying to save her.
She later justified denying her son food and water, writing, “I don't feed the devil.”
Mr. Franke's attorney, Lamar Winward, and Mr. Hildebrandt's attorney, Douglas Terry, did not immediately respond to requests for comment Friday about the new evidence.
Body camera video shows officers entering Hildebrandt's home and restraining her on a couch while other officers search the winding hallways looking for the girl. They soon discovered a child with a shaved head sitting cross-legged in a dark, empty closet. After sitting with the girl for hours and feeding her pizza, the police pacified her and kicked her out.
Franke said he shaved the girl's head several times to make her cry and wrote in his diary: “If she's trying to pretend to be sick, she might look sick.”
Franke and her husband, Kevin Franke, launched “8 Passengers'' on YouTube in 2015, documenting their experiences raising six children in Springville's Mormon community and amassing a large following. The couple has two children, ages 15 and 16, and two grown children.
She then began working with Hildebrandt's counseling company, ConneXions Classroom, offering parenting seminars, launching a separate YouTube channel, and publishing content on the company's shared Instagram account, “Moms of Truth” .
Ruby Franke was already a divisive figure in the world of video blogging. Franke's parents were criticized online for banning their eldest son from his bedroom for seven months after he pranked his older brother. In another video, Ruby Franke talked about refusing to take a kindergartener's lunch to a kindergartener who forgot it at her house.
The “8 Passengers” YouTube channel has since been terminated, and Kevin Franke filed for divorce shortly after his wife's arrest. In interrogation footage, he appears stunned when officers inform him of his son's condition. Investigators said Franke had not seen his wife or children since he asked for eviction in July 2022.
Kevin Franke has filed multiple petitions in the months since his wife's arrest, hoping to regain custody of their four minor children, who were in state custody.
