The Utah family vlogger was arrested last week on six felony child abuse charges
Long before Utah family vlogger Ruby Franke’s arrest last week, local police were notified on two occasions in 2022 from people expressing concern for her children.
In one of the calls to police, Franke’s oldest daughter Shari requested a welfare check at Franke’s Springville home on Sept. 18, 2022.
The call was made to police less than a year before Franke, 41, was arrested alongside her podcasting partner Jodi Hildebrandt on Aug. 30 after her 12-year-old son, who allegedly had duct tape on his wrists and ankles, escaped from a window at Hildebrandt’s home in Ivins, Utah, and ran to a neighbor’s house pleading for food and water, police say.
The two women have since been charged with six felony counts of child abuse, the Washington County Attorney’s Office confirmed to PEOPLE.
According to police reports obtained by PEOPLE, Franke’s oldest daughter was allegedly notified by a neighbor who informed her that her younger siblings had been home alone for about five days. The daughter told police that her mother was in St. George with Hildebrandt. (It’s not immediately clear if the daughter was referring to St. George, Utah.)
“[She] asked that we check on the kids and make sure they were safe and had food for the extended period,” says the reporting officer with the Springville Police Department.
In the report, the officer said he went to Franke’s home and knocked on the door but no one answered.
“The kids were seen through the windows but would not answer the door,” states the report.
The officer said he spoke to neighbors who alleged to him that "the mother of the residence, Ruby Franke, will leave her children home for extended periods of time and go to St. George and spend time with her friend Jodi Hildebrandt.”
“Everyone who came to the scene was very concerned about the children and them being left at home alone,” states the report. “They expressed great concern about the two youngest children being homeschooled while the two older ones go to public school. Mostly because it shows they are home alone during the day by themselves and there isn’t any way for them to contact emergency services if needed, due to them not having phones and a landline not being available in the home.”
The Springville Police Department could not be reached by PEOPLE for comment but, according to KSL, officers followed up and assisted Utah’s Division of Child and Family Services on three occasions afterwards.
Earlier, in April of 2022, a case worker with the Division of Child and Family Services contacted the police after “she was made aware of two kids running out in the road unsupervised,” according to the police report. The officer checked out the complaint but did not see any children on the street.
According to the police records, Franke herself called police twice in 2020 to report that she was receiving threatening messages.
In one incident, on April 27, 2020, Franke told police that she received “a text message from somebody stating they were going to take her family down and there will be riots at their door when the world finds out the truth.”
Franke documented her strict parenting style on the family’s YouTube channel 8Passengers for years before she transitioned last summer to posting family advice podcasts with Hildebrandt on her ConneXions channel.
YouTube deleted both the 8Passengers and ConneXions pages following the women’s arrest last week, and a spokesperson recently told PEOPLE the platform implemented a permanent ban on Franke in light of her child abuse charges.
If you suspect child abuse, call the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child or 1-800-422-4453, or go to www.childhelp.org. All calls are toll-free and confidential. The hotline is available 24/7 in more than 170 languages.