The malnourished and badly bruised son of a parenting advice YouTuber politely asks a neighbor to take him to the nearest police station in newly released video from the day his mother and her business partner were arrested on child abuse charges in southern Utah.
The 12-year-old son of Ruby Franke, a mother of six who dispensed advice to millions via a popular YouTube channel, had escaped through a window and approached several nearby homes until someone answered the door, according to documents released Friday by the Washington County Attorney’s office.
Crime scene photos, body camera video and interrogation tapes were released a month after Franke and business partner Jodi Hildebrandt, a mental health counselor, were each sentenced to up to 30 years in prison. A police investigation determined religious extremism motivated the women to inflict horrific abuse on Franke’s children, Washington County Attorney Eric Clarke announced Friday.
“The women appeared to fully believe that the abuse they inflicted was necessary to teach the children how to properly repent for imagined ‘sins’ and to cast the evil spirits out of their bodies,” Clarke said.
Franke 100% would have been doing this even without being a YouTuber. What she was doing on 8 Passengers is not all that extreme in Mormon circles, and I don’t mean just the deeply conservative ones. Yes, she went a little farther than most Mormons would be comfortable with, but the core ideas? They entirely understand where she was coming from. The commonly cited example is her refusing to bring lunch to a child (6yo?) that forgot it, saying that it’s ‘personal responsibility’; many Mormons would argue that it’s a little too young to expect a 6yo to be fully responsible like that, but if a 10yo child forgot? Or an 8yo? No problem.
Yup. An eight year old is plenty old enough to accept baptism and a lifetime of church membership and begin taking accountability for their own sins!
8yo children are clearly old enough to evaluate the truth claims and to be able to engage in the serious biblical scholarship that you need to be able to make sense of the Book of Mormon, as well as being old enough to know the historical context of JS Jr. and his actions. So, uh… (Obvious sarcasm is obvious.)