Angry text messages from strangers. Spam emails for plastic surgeries. And then, in the middle of the night in 2020, someone — covering their face — rang the doorbell with a threatening message for the vlogging family of eight.
But the family’s angry followers were not so easily reassured. As the threats escalated, Kevin called David Corrington, a private investigator and a retired special agent with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
“I think what really threw it over the edge was this person showing up in the middle of the night ringing the doorbell,” Corrington tells PEOPLE in the latest issue, on newsstands Friday. “That starts getting a little more personal and scary with the children being in the house.” He said the couple hired him shortly after the incident.
Corrington — who says he believed there were “several individuals that were targeting” the couple — said the family “definitely had some frustration that the police department was not doing enough.”
But many people continued to believe the Franke children were being mistreated. Over the years, calls to police and child protective services continued against the family.
Shari Franke.Francisco Kjolseth/The Salt Lake Tribune
Francisco Kjolseth/The Salt Lake Tribune
Responding to calls from a concerned neighbor and Shari, the couple’s estranged eldest daughter, the family racked up multiple visits from social workers, who did not substantiate any allegation until August.
“Basically what child protective services told us is we can’t do anything until somebody gets hurt,” the neighbor tells PEOPLE.
Then the couple’s youngest son, Russell, slipped out a window in a home where he was staying with his mother and younger sister, Eve, at family therapist Jodi Hildebrandt’s home in Ivins, Utah, and rang the neighbor’s doorbell.Too small for his shorts and with sores pussing along his wrists and duct tape around his ankles, the sandy blond 12-year-old,asked the man to call 911.
“He says what’s happened to him is his fault,” the neighbor — his voice breaking — relayed to the emergency operator.
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Kevin Franke (right) with lawyer, Randy Kester.Francisco Kjolseth/The Salt Lake Tribune
“It’s unfortunate that it takes some of these extreme situations for the government to intervene,” Corrington said. “You certainly have to ask the question, why did this fall through the cracks in our system?”
Shari Franke’s Instagram Story post, following her mother’s arrest.
Posting to Instagram Stories after her mother’s arrest, Shari shared a snap of the officers outside the family’s house,writing, “Finally.”
source: people.com
