‘Incredible unit’: Hampton teens fight to stay together after parents’ death

HAMPTON — In the span of about a year Bella, Austin and Aria Amos lost their mother, then their father, then the roof over their heads. Today the three teenagers are working to create a future together.

“These three are an incredible unit,” said Kris Dehnert, a friend of their late father, Anthony Amos. “They’re amazing kids. They’re more mature than a lot of adults.”

Dehnert started a GoFundMe page to raise funds for Bella, 18, Austin, 17, and Aria, 16 so they can stay together as a family after they were evicted from their rental in North Hampton.

The three have since found a temporary winter rental at Hampton Beach and both Austin and Aria attend Winnacunnet High School.

The Amos children are hoping to raise enough money to find a new place to call home.

“We just want to heal in our own space where we can have that freedom, where we’re not stepping on anyone’s toes,” said Bella, who has become the legal guardian for her younger siblings.

From Australia to the Seacoast

The Amos siblings are originally from Queensland, Australia. It was there, at only 21 their dad founded a mobile dog grooming business, Hydrodog, that he’d successfully franchised, according to Austin. After selling the company, Anthony Amos came to the United States with his wife, Rachel, and family, hoping to establish a similar enterprise here, his son said.

That was back in 2010, Austin estimated. When they first arrived in Florida, he and his siblings were just youngsters. Although Hydrodog didn’t take off here as it did Down Under, according to Bella, the family found a new and very special cause: animal rescue.

“That was when we learned about the high rate of (animal) euthanasia in the United States,” Bella said. “So we started the ‘Bathe to Save’ tour to raise awareness about animal adoption.”

Traveling across the country with their parents in an RV, the family raised awareness and funds by bathing animals and donating the money to animal rescue organizations. Their mission received national exposure, making its way to Animal Planet and an appearance on the Rachael Ray Show.

In 2017, the “Bathe to Save” tour visited Somersworth with its mobile dog washing unit and raised money for the Cocheco Valley Humane Society. About three years ago, Austin said, the family settled in a rental home in North Hampton, in a state with a climate unlike their native Queensland.

“We just fell in love with the snow up here,” he said.

The children attended local schools. Bella graduated from Winnacunnet High School; her brother and sister are juniors there now.

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Unbearable loss

But in 2020, life as the three siblings knew it began to fall apart. First, following what was supposed to be a simple surgery, their mother suddenly died following a medical mishap. Not long after, their father’s cancer returned with a vengeance.

“We literally watched them both be so healthy, and we just watched them die,” said Bella.

"Mom was amazing, to say the least," said Aria. "She was a very strong individual... She was the person I looked at when I was feeling stressed or any other emotions I didn't really know where to put. I put them with mom."

Austin said mom was the "brains behind things" and "kept Dad in line."

"Once mom passed away, it was a lot different," said Bella. " Dad was very heartbroken. He didn't have time to even grieve because once mom passed away, he had cancer again."

"Dad was a person who was loud and proud and always out there," Austin said.

"Every day there was a motivation there, 'how can I make someone smile,'" Aria said. "It was just always fun with him. Dad would wake up in the morning and be like 'kids let's go. We're ready. Today is the best day of our lives.' Every day he'd say that. Because it was...

"They were just not parents to us, they were just like... our best friends."

Dehnert said the three kids took care of their dad for months through his illness.

Grieving for lost parents who meant the world to them, stranded as children on their parent’s visa that didn’t allow them to work in the United States, and without extended family here or a reliable source of income, the teens quickly found themselves without a place to live. A week after their father’s death, they were evicted from their rental home in North Hampton.

According to Bella, the landlord told them, “he didn’t trust kids being in the house without parents.”

“But, we were running the house for months while our father was sick,” Aria said. “We’re more mature than most kids.”

Friends come forward to help

Dehnert and other of Anthony Amos’ friends pulled together an advisory board for the three siblings that included needed expertise, including a lawyer and an accountant.

“Anthony was a good friend. He was a ball of energy,” said Dehnert, a marketing professional from Florida who’d worked with Amos on the Bathe to Save national tour. “Everybody banded together to take care of Anthony’s kids as he would’ve done for ours.”

They quickly raised some money and flew the teens to Florida to learn what they need and what they want, he said.

“We were very impressed with those kids,” Dehnert said. “They want to stay together. They want to finish high school up there (at WHS). And they want to continue their father’s legacy. Their parents raised them to be incredible people.”

And they want to remain in the United States, he said, because it’s pretty much all they know.

“They’ve lived here for nearly all of their lives,” Dehnert said.

Knowing they needed a more permanent place to live, one of the advisory board members flew up to New Hampshire and found the three a winter rental in Hampton.

Bella, at 18, is now the legal guardian for Aria and Austin, but because she still doesn’t have the right kind of work visa, she can’t get a job to support the family.

“We’re working on it,” she said. “We’ve filed applications for new visas. Right now we’re here on compassionate visas.”

According to Dehnert, Anthony Amos had life insurance. Although the insurance company hasn’t been forthcoming with all of the insurance money, he said, the children have been able to access some of it to cover their immediate needs.

Moving forward together

Dehnert established a GoFundMe page for the three with a goal of raising $84,000, the amount the advisory board believes is needed to support the three until Aria and Austin’s graduation and until they have the necessary work visas. So far, the GoFundMe page has raised just over $27,600.

“We have an accountant, Pam Jordan, who’ll be managing the funds for them,” Dehnert said. “When we spent time with these kids, we realized they had heads on them to do good things. They just need to have the funds to get there.”

And they’re going to need another rental place along the Seacoast soon, Bella said, because the lease on their winter rental in Hampton ends in June.

The tragedy that’s struck these three siblings could emotionally cripple such vulnerable youth, but according to their own words in a video on their GoFundMe page, they are not about to let that happen to them.

“I believe in 10 years we’ll be thriving and have an amazing life together,” Bella said in the video. “And we’ll look back on this and know that this is what’s built us in order to be successful.”

“We feel there’s a bigger purpose for us,” Aria said. “We just need help to get us started.”

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Hampton NH teens fight to stay together after parents’ death