A Kentucky couple who saw their 10 children taken away by protective services after they were found living in squalor under a tarp is heading to court Monday to try and get them back.
Joe Naugler and pregnant wife Nicole claim their rights as ‘free-style’ parents were violated last week when authorities entered the couple’s 27-acre ‘homestead’ in Garfield and took the kids following complaints to CPS that the kids were living amid garbage and without any real shelter or running water.
‘I don’t know where my children are but if you have them, tell them we miss and love them dearly,’ Nicole wrote on the family Facebook page, Blessed Little Homestead on Friday. ‘My heart is broken. I have been trying to keep busy with the legal stuff to keep my mind busy. It’s going to be the longest weekend of my life.’
Despite the apparent shocking conditions and photos showing a ramshackle hut of a home and her children playing in mud, Nicole has amassed a legion of supporters online.
in just three days, a GoFundMe page created in support of the Nauglers by a friend based in Arizona raised a whopping $35,500.
That family friend, Pace Ellsworth, says his relationship with the family is based on their ‘common interests in freedom and entrepreneurship’ and claims the ‘industrious’ couple is simply trying to teach their children how ‘to live right.’
‘At the start of this campaign, the Nauglers didn’t know what it would take to get their children back and they are now in the process of determining with an attorney what needs to be done to ensure the safe return of their children,’ Ellsworth wrote.
Ellsworth told the WAVE3.com on Friday that ‘A CPS visit with her today went well…They’re looking forward to getting the children back.’
His GoFundMe page says the money raised will go towards legal costs of getting the children back and upgrades to the Naugler’s home.
Nicole Naugler was scheduled to appear in court on Tuesday after she was arrested for obstruction when she refused to give her children up to police.