In November, 2014, after a grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri, declined to indict a white police officer, Darren Wilson, in the killing of an unarmed Black teen-ager, Michael Brown, a photograph from one of many demonstrations that followed nationwide, in Portland, Oregon, was shared hundreds of thousands of times on Facebook. (One post was from Cory Booker, the senator from New Jersey, who called it “a photo I love.”) The image got writeups in Time and the Washington Post and provided fodder for a cold-open skit on “Saturday Night Live.” The photographer, Johnny Nguyen, said that his picture “spread the message of coming together despite our differences.” Brian Williams, then an NBC News anchor, told viewers, “What the world needs now might just be what we see in this photo.” The Christian Science Monitor decreed the appropriate “emotional reaction to the photo” as “inevitably, a tear-stained smile, unless one’s heart is a rock.”
The photograph, taken amid what seemed to be an otherwise peaceful protest, captured a crying Black boy, twelve-year-old Devonte Hart, clutching a white police officer, Bret Barnum. It might have felt grotesque, not inevitable, to smile warmly at the sight of a frightened-looking child; it may have been difficult to locate what the world needed in seeing it. One of the few dissenting media responses, from the Guardian, called the image “a blatant lie” that held “a deep appeal to those looking for a soft focus view of race in America.” But where was the “deep appeal” in the sight of a distressed child? Did the boy feel the focus on him to be soft? Why was he crying? Where was his mother?
“Devonte has a remarkable story himself,” Williams told his NBC audience. “Born to a drug-addicted mother and into a violent life, he and his two siblings were adopted into a loving family.” This information, plus lurid details, had been supplied to the media by one of Devonte’s adoptive parents, a white woman named Jennifer Hart. She chronicled the kids’ triumphs over early adversity in logorrheic Facebook posts, in which she cast herself and her wife, Sarah, who was also white, as the children’s saviors. (“If not us, who?” Jennifer once asked.) Because Devonte’s distress in the famous photo was a cipher for racial reconciliation—or, rather, of a racialized noblesse oblige—it was not like the distress of other children, and could be smiled at, because it was the distress of a statue, a symbol. His story was one of rescue, whether by a white parent or a white cop; the anguish captured in the photograph, it followed, could be interpreted as a kind of shocked and sorrowful relief. Wherever he was, it must be better than wherever he came from. This way of thinking was the germ that made the photograph go viral.
Three and a half years after the protest in Portland, Jennifer Hart intentionally drove her S.U.V. off a strip of the Pacific Coast Highway, in northern California, down a hundred-foot drop into the ocean. Inside were Sarah and the couple’s six adopted Black children: Devonte and his biological siblings Jeremiah and Ciera; and another set of biological siblings, Markis, Hannah, and Abigail. (Examination of Sarah’s Internet-search history prior to the crash indicated that she had colluded in the murder-suicide plot.) As later reporting revealed, the Harts were able to adopt and retain custody of the children despite years of mounting evidence of abuse and neglect, including child-protection investigations across three states, and despite the fact that three of the children had family members, in their home state of Texas, who wanted them back. The same forgiving light of altruism—of benevolent rescue—that shined on the Harts as adoptive parents also cast the kids’ birth families under a shadow of permanent guilt and suspicion.
Glimmers of that distorting light could still be detected long after the full extent of the Harts’ crimes became clear. In a blockbuster podcast about the tragedy, “Broken Harts,” which has been downloaded more than eleven million times, the hosts refer to Jennifer and Sarah as “antiheroes,” and suggest that, in considering the Harts’ actions, “it is a relatable feeling as a mother, as a woman, to feel trapped by the choices you make.”
The affinities of “We Were Once a Family,” Roxanna Asgarian’s moving and superbly reported book about the Hart tragedy, are mainly with the children’s birth relatives. Asgarian, a journalist based in Houston at the time, was the first reporter to interview Priscilla Celestine, an aunt of Devonte, Jeremiah, and Ciera; Celestine briefly took care of them and their older brother, Dontay, and she litigated for years to adopt them. And, notably, it was Asgarian, not police investigators, who, after poring through records made public by a sheriff’s office in Washington State, was the first person to track down a birth relative of Markis, Abigail, and Hannah, in order to inform their family of their deaths—seven months after they were killed. It was Asgarian’s work, in fact, that enabled Hannah’s remains to be identified. (Her reporting on the case appeared in the Oregonian, the Appeal, and the Washington Post.)
Asgarian developed relationships with the birth mothers of the children: Tammy Scheurich, who is white, and who was once charged with child endangerment of Hannah; and Sherry Davis, who is Black, and who struggled for years with cocaine addiction. Both women had relinquished their parental rights, although there is nothing in the public record, nor in Asgarian’s reporting, to indicate that either Scheurich or Davis ever physically abused her children, or that the hundreds of thousands of dollars in public money that the Harts received as foster and adoptive parents over the years would not have been better spent on supports for keeping the children’s birth families intact: day-care vouchers, drug-rehabilitation programs, mental-health counselling. (In 2021, Asgarian notes, the Texas state legislature reformed the Texas Family Code to make “it much harder to remove a child for issues of neglect, which advocates say is often just another word for poverty.”)
The first police report logging suspicion of child abuse against the Harts dated to 2008, two years after they adopted their first three children; Hannah, then six, told a teacher that Jennifer had beaten her with a belt. Incredibly, the Harts’ adoption of Devonte, Jeremiah, and Ciera proceeded apace, while Celestine’s case to regain custody of them dragged on for two more years. Between 2010 and 2011, schools in Minnesota called social services on the Harts at least six times, with reports that the children were bruised, hungry, rummaging through trash for food, and taking food from other students. In 2011, Sarah pleaded guilty to misdemeanor domestic assault of six-year-old Abigail, and received a suspended sentence and a year of probation. But no official threatened to take the kids away from the Harts; no agency intervened when, immediately following Sarah’s guilty plea, the Harts pulled all the kids from public school and began homeschooling them; no authority stepped in when, after Sarah’s probation was up, the family moved from Minnesota to a suburb of Portland, Oregon. In 2013, at least two family acquaintances reported the Harts to social services, and a caseworker in Oregon contacted one of the Harts’ previous caseworkers in Minnesota, who disclosed the incident that had led to Sarah’s guilty plea on domestic-violence charges, in addition to other reports of abuse or neglect. Yet the Oregon case was closed, too.
In the Harts’ final home, in Washington State, a neighboring couple, Bruce and Dana DeKalb, had contact with Hannah and Devonte in the last weeks and months of their lives, sneaked them food, and eventually called Child Protective Services on the Harts, days before the murder-suicide. The DeKalbs guessed that Hannah was about seven years old when she was in fact sixteen—according to the 2013 investigation from Oregon child services, five of the six children were far below the growth charts for their age. On Jennifer’s busy Facebook page, though, the kids shape-shifted into a crunchy, freewheeling rainbow coalition—skinny, grinning homesteaders who lived off the grid but firmly in the embrace of the (overwhelmingly white) community that the Harts sought out at hippie music festivals, where Devonte sometimes wore a “Free Hugs” sign (like the one he held at the famous Portland protest).
A grim truth that emerges from “We Were Once a Family” is that removing a child from his birth or adoptive home, however horrendous that home may be, and placing him into the foster-care system is itself a form of trauma. Dana DeKalb said that, despite the abuse Devonte was enduring, he told her not to call the police, because he feared that he and his siblings would be split up in foster care.
Any foster-care network is, by its nature, at odds with itself: designed to help families stay together and to help families get taken apart. Foster care has, unquestionably, extracted many children from abusive situations and helped to forge new, happy homes where they find safety and unconditional love. But, as Dorothy Roberts argues in her 2022 book “Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World,” the racial disparities in the U.S. child-welfare system are counterparts to those of the criminal-justice and welfare systems. This three-pronged bureaucracy, Roberts writes, too often harshly scrutinizes and punishes Black families and children rather than protecting them, effecting “violent state containment of Black communities.”
The child-welfare system may also be rotten from its roots. Asgarian writes that the Children’s Aid Society, which was founded in New York City in the mid-nineteenth century and became the prototype for a nascent foster-care movement, was, at its worst, a trafficking network for kids destined for indentured servitude. (An early flyer boasted of “draining the city of these children” by sending them to points west to work on farms or in factories, or to perform domestic labor in private homes.) Until 1978, when the Indian Child Welfare Act (I.C.W.A.) was passed, astonishingly high numbers of Native children were removed from their homes and placed with white families, owing partly to the support of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The Adoption and Safe Families Act, signed by President Bill Clinton in 1997, moved to deëmphasize the importance of keeping birth families intact in favor of more quickly terminating parental rights. This law, Asgarian writes, compounded the adverse effects of Clinton’s crime- and welfare-reform bills, which “made Black families particularly vulnerable to coming under the surveillance of the child welfare system.” By 2006, when Devonte, Jeremiah, Ciera, and their older brother, Dontay, were removed from their home, “Black children in Texas were almost twice as likely to be reported as victims of abuse or neglect than white children. They were also removed from their families at a higher rate, spent longer in substitute care, were less likely to be reunited with their families, and waited longer to get adopted.”
Asgarian’s rendering of this broad historical context is at times rushed or disorganized, but it nonetheless provides a crucial framework for one of the book’s most compelling threads: its portrait of Dontay Davis. Dontay was ten when he and his siblings were removed from their aunt’s house; by the time his siblings moved in with the Harts, in 2008, he had changed foster-care placements multiple times. He was violently acting out at school and at home, and this led to stays in a psychiatric hospital and a “residential treatment center” (R.T.C.)—a euphemism for poorly staffed orphanages, which are typically populated by older, traumatized children with behavioral or psychiatric issues, and who are unlikely to find permanent adoptive homes. Like his brothers and sister, Dontay was failed by every system set up to support him. By the age of twelve, he had difficulty reading and writing. Like many young men in the Texas foster-care system, Dontay became entangled in the criminal-justice system soon after aging out—in his case, through a three-year prison sentence for aggravated burglary, at age nineteen.
A refrain that emerges from Asgarian’s patient, compassionate reporting is the refusal by the people in Dontay’s life ever to give him a straight answer about anything. C.P.S. caseworkers keep him in the dark about breaking up his family. No one tells him at first that his siblings are being adopted in another state, and he doesn’t get to say goodbye. Asgarian is there when Dontay’s father figure, girlfriend, and toddler son visit him in prison, in the summer of 2018; the family can’t bear to tell him that his siblings are dead. Four months after his siblings were murdered, Dontay was still vowing to find Devonte, Jeremiah, and Ciera, as soon as he was released. ♦