'We Were Once a Family' is a riveting, grim look at the child welfare system
Jennifer and Sarah Hart were a White married couple, together since college, who adopted a set of three biracial siblings in 2006 and three Black siblings two years later. All six adopted children — Ciera, Abigail, Jeremiah, Devonte, Hannah and Markis — came from the Texas foster-care system. For 10 years, Jen maintained a flamboyant Facebook presence, filled with adorable photos of the children, proclamations of Black allyship, and proud endorsements of meditation and vegetarianism. Many on social media bought into the image of devoted parents taking on a burden others would flinch at, providing a home for children who, in Jen’s telling, had been mistreated and forgotten before she and Sarah came along.
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But all of that was a smokescreen. In the early hours of March 26, 2018, the Harts’ SUV veered off the Pacific Coast Highway, fell off a sharp cliff and crashed on the jagged rocks below. There were no survivors.
It soon came out that the Harts had moved twice in recent years — from Minnesota to Oregon, and Oregon to Washington — with complaints filed against them with children’s protective services agencies everywhere they went. An inquest found that there were no skid marks on the cliff where the Harts’ SUV went flying — and that the Harts had dosed the children, who ranged in age from 12 to 19, and themselves with extraordinary amounts of Benadryl. This was premeditated, the culmination of a nightmarish family life.
Even so, the local sheriff cast it as “a ‘Thelma and Louise’ situation” — two harried idealists, done in by the pressures of a world gone mad. This prompted the journalist Roxanna Asgarian to wonder why so few people were saying what actually happened. “What is drugging your family and driving them off a cliff,” she asks, “if not murder?”
Asgarian is based in Texas, where the six Hart children came from. She is the law and courts reporter for the Texas Tribune and has experience reporting on the child welfare system. That vantage point, and her interest in how power shapes and controls social narratives, drew her inexorably to this case. “I knew that there was much more to this story,” she writes, “and that it started earlier, way earlier, when these kids were still in their homes with their birth parents.”
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Her bracing gut punch of a book, “We Were Once a Family,” is a provocative mix of immersive narrative journalism, rigorous social policy analysis and proud advocacy. It pulls back the focus from the horrific crash to investigate, thoroughly and intimately, why these six children were sent out of Texas in the first place — away not just from their parents but from responsible family members who could have kept the children close. In Asgarian’s telling, the child welfare system in America — a “large web of state, county and city agencies” as she explains it, responsible for some 425,000 children — may not be specifically designed to tear children away from the people who love them and place them into the homes of swiftly and carelessly vetted strangers, but time and again it does exactly that.
Asgarian begins with a powerfully rendered narrative of how the second set of three children the Harts adopted — Ciera, Devonte and Jeremiah — were caught up in the wheels of a Texas family court plagued by cronyism, xenophobia and a zeal for placing children anywhere but near their families. The children’s mother, Sherry Davis, was a drug user, but her partner, Nathaniel, much older and not living with Sherry, was a more-than-ideal caregiver for the children. So was the children’s aunt Priscilla, who played by the rules of the system and applied for custody. In reality, neither Nathaniel nor Priscilla had a chance: The family court judge, the larger-than-life, brash and braying Patrick Shelton, locked them both out of the process. Without them knowing it even happened, the three children were sent to Minnesota, into the hands of the Harts. A fourth brother — Sherry’s oldest son, Dontay — was left to languish in a residential program, without ever being told his three siblings had left the state.
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Asgarian was so far ahead of any other reporter that she became the first to locate the family of the other set of adopted children: Abigail, Hannah and Markis. No one before Asgarian had bothered to notify their mother, Tammy Scheurich. (“I was floored when I realized she didn’t know,” Asgarian writes.) By the time Tammy first became a mother, at 18, she’d experienced enough trauma for several lifetimes: sexual abuse as a child, domestic violence, mental illness and hospitalizations; suicide attempts and homelessness would follow. The three children were taken from her during a health emergency for Hannah — which becomes a chance for Asgarian to note how hospitals serve as an arm of the child welfare complex. Tammy lived in a world where bringing a child to the hospital could result in that child never coming home. And that’s what happened. Tammy’s distrustful relationship with the hospital was interpreted by one Child Protective Services official as evidence of child neglect. A “blindsided” Tammy was then charged with child endangerment. And when she failed to pay $225 in court fees she was sent to jail for 30 days, received no mental health support and developed an abiding hatred for the caseworker who took the children away. Other family members were never considered as an option; instead Tammy’s children went to the Harts.
The Harts made me think of cult leaders, broadcasting messages of love and compassion to conceal something more sadistic and pathological. Asgarian suggests that their intensely cultivated image of perfection was destined to crack — and once it did, there was no going back. In reality, there weren’t enough beds in their home for all six of the kids. Hannah, twice reported with bruises, had her two front teeth knocked out, and at age 12 she stood just 3 feet, 7 inches tall and weighed about 50 pounds. One friend who reported the Harts to the Oregon Department of Human Services said that Jen “views the children as animals before they came to her, and she as their savior.” And yet for the longest time, no complaint seemed to stick. The Harts’ first investigations for abuse, astonishingly, took place before they adopted the second set of children. Those reports, Asgarian notes, slipped through the cracks; unlike the birth families, the Harts “were met with the benefit of the doubt.”
The children are killed with more than 100 pages left in the book. It is here that Asgarian fully steps into the narrative, developing deep personal ties with the children’s birth parents, their partners, their other children and their caseworkers, getting to understand the depths of their impossible life situations and the institutional neglect.
The most affecting story is of Dontay Davis, the brother left behind, first institutionalized and later incarcerated. It took almost a year, Asgarian writes, for Dontay to even talk to her. And later on, when he learned that his three siblings were gone, his heart was shattered: “That was the last little hope I had in my life.” Asgarian’s portrait of this traumatized boy as he becomes an even more scarred and dysfunctional man works as a microcosm for all the book’s arguments. “Many of the systems that could now help him as an adult remind him too much of CPS, the entity he blames for the destruction of his family and the death of his siblings,” she writes. And later we see history repeating, as Dontay’s own son enters the sights of the child welfare bureaucracy.
Asgarian views many of the people in this book through the prisms of psychology (domestic violence, trauma, PTSD), policy (mass incarceration, child welfare agencies) and cultural bias — even as she becomes intimately involved in their lives. “In this book, I’m not a passive observer of injustice,” she writes. “The child welfare system didn’t cause the trauma Tammy or Sherry experienced at a young age, but neither did it help them deal with it.” Their birth families “were not beating their children or starving them; they were clearly struggling with substance use and mental illness, but instead of receiving help, the parents were punished.”
Priscilla puts it more bluntly: “They got it all backwards. They should have done something with the mother, put her in rehab — but you have people here, loved ones, to take them in, and you take them away. They got it all messed up.”
Robert Kolker is the author of “Hidden Valley Road.”
We Were Once a Family
A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America
By Roxanna Asgarian
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 297 pp. $28
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