Washington State Family Drives Off Cliff in Ca
Before Harts Plunged Off a Cliff, Strain Dogged Family
At 3:38 p.grand. on Monday, March 26, 2018, a German tourist called the authorities from the Juan Creek crossing on California's scenic Highway 1. She had spotted something jarring: a brown sport-utility vehicle, upside downwardly, in the Pacific Ocean.
When Highway Patrol officers arrived, they found the S.U.Five. Jennifer Hart was at the cycle, and her wife, Sarah Hart, was trapped betwixt the roof and the seats in the dorsum. Both were dead.
Within about three weeks, the authorities would also discover the remains of four of the Harts' vi children — Markis, 19, Jeremiah, fourteen, Abigail, 14, and Ciera, 12 — and declare them all dead, likewise. They eventually discovered skeletal remains within a adult female'southward shoe, and announced this calendar month that they belonged to 16-year-old Hannah. Devonte, 15, is still considered to exist missing, but is presumed expressionless.
Jennifer, 38, had been drunk at the fourth dimension of the crash, and Sarah, 38, and two of their children had in their systems a significant amount of an antihistamine that can crusade drowsiness, police enforcement officials said.
Though the central question of why Jennifer Hart drove off the cliff may never exist resolved, interviews and more than 1,000 pages of investigative documents released by the authorities in Washington State — where the family last lived — reveal the most brilliant picture nevertheless of the Hart family.
They portray Jennifer and Sarah as adoptive mothers under increasing strain, who fled at signs of trouble and closed ranks around their children as scrutiny intensified.
And they show that by that fateful Monday last March, equally kid welfare officials came knocking, some neighbors, relatives and co-workers were growing alarmed.
"Are yous ok?!" i of Sarah's co-workers texted her two minutes subsequently the German tourist reported the S.U.V. "Please let someone know...nosotros are all freaking out here."
[Read our initial coverage of the crash ]
Law enforcement officials in California accept issued but i statement on the case since May, though the investigation continues. Relatives and friends of Jennifer and Sarah declined to annotate for this article. Still, the documents illuminate the complicated family dynamics amidst the Harts — a white couple who adopted six black children, all of whom would perish.
A family grows
Paradigm
Jennifer Jean Hart and Sarah Margaret Gengler grew up about 150 miles apart in S Dakota and met at Northern State University. By 2005, they were living together in Alexandria, Minn.
Investigative documents say they provided foster care for a 16-yr-one-time girl who was removed from their home in February 2006 considering of her "suicidal idealizations and threats." The couple were planning to adopt and said they "didn't want that negative energy to impact their children," the documents said.
Markis, Hannah and Abigail were placed with the Harts on March 4, 2006, and their adoption was completed half-dozen months later. Within a year, the women spent at to the lowest degree 15 hours training on topics similar "racial diversity excitement" and "helping abused kids in care heal," documents show.
"The Hart family takes every opportunity to celebrate the children'southward ethnic heritage," a caseworker wrote in a report for the Permanent Family unit Resource Center, a foster care and adoption agency in Fergus Falls, Minn., that later closed afterward beingness cited for lawmaking violations. The caseworker "whole heartily" recommended that the family unit be able to prefer a second sibling group.
Jeremiah, Devonte and Ciera were adopted in June 2008, documents evidence; Jennifer and Sarah married in Connecticut the next year.
In a March 2009 email, Jennifer shared plans for the family's next pace: Sarah is "trying to go significant," she wrote.
"After 10 years of talking virtually this, we have decided on a donor," Jennifer wrote. "This month will exist the first time she will have done the bodily procedure. It'southward kind of nervewracking."
Just past July, she wrote to someone else, the doctor "couldn't find the baby's heart beat."
She updated the person six days later: "The baby did not make it."
Signs of trouble
Paradigm
In an August 2010 email to another woman, Jennifer complained about Sarah, who she said had "said some hurtful things."
"For quite some time I accept felt very under appreciated, and taken for granted in our relationship...and at times unloved," she wrote. "While I know deep in my heart how much she loves me...she is only horrible about showing it."
"I accept felt that I have been raising the kids on my own," she added. "I need a 'interruption.'"
A few months afterwards, Minnesota Kid Welfare received half-dozen reports of corruption or fail past the Harts — two of which it deemed apparent. In one episode, Sarah admitted to having physically harmed Abigail. Records testify Sarah was bedevilled of misdemeanor domestic assault.
The family unit then made its start major movement — to West Linn, Ore. — where an bearding person told officials that the Hart children appeared malnourished. Investigators in Oregon began an inquiry and interviewed women who knew the family and described them equally militant parents who imposed harsh disciplinary measures on their children.
[Read more about the reports made to child welfare officials' and their attempts to intervene.]
But whatever private turmoil was glossed over by public videos and posts on social media that portrayed a happy, if eccentric, family. YouTube videos posted past Jennifer, for example, evidence Devonte dancing and the other children singing, "Nosotros are and then provided for."
Merely at a 2014 demonstration in Portland, Ore., to protest police violence, Devonte was photographed with a pained expression hugging a white police sergeant. The image went viral, and it was time to movement again.
Prototype
Meeting the neighbors
By May 2017 the Harts were living on more than than 2 acres of state in Woodland, Wash. The but two other homes nearby were shrouded by trees and fences.
Bruce and Dana DeKalb lived in one of them. They told investigators that they had been excited to accept new neighbors. But they then rarely saw anyone from the holding that they initially wondered if a family had in fact moved in.
They had. Effectually 1:30 a.m. ane day in August 2017, Hannah rang the DeKalbs' doorbell and ran within their abode, the DeKalbs said in interviews. She was missing two teeth and was so sparse that they thought the teenager was 6 or 7 years old.
"Can yous take me to Seattle?" Mr. DeKalb, 63, recalled her asking.
Hannah said she had jumped out of a second-story window to escape. She explained that she had been whipped and that her mothers were racist, Mr. DeKalb said.
Minutes afterwards, Hannah's parents showed upwardly at the DeKalbs' home, and Hannah hid in a sleeping room.
Somewhen, Ms. DeKalb gave Jennifer time to speak with her girl alone. After they came downstairs, Hannah apologized, and they went home, Ms. DeKalb said.
Hannah and her family returned the next morning with a written amends. Jennifer explained that Hannah was bipolar and struggling with the death of their cat. Otherwise, Jennifer insisted, the children loved their new dwelling only as they loved spontaneous adventures. The children nodded.
"She was then convincing," Ms. DeKalb, 59, said of Jennifer.
Still, Ms. DeKalb was worried. In the months that followed, none of the Hart children would speak with her when she tried to talk with them.
Then, in March 2018, Devonte began going to the DeKalb residence requesting nutrient.
Devonte told the DeKalbs his parents were withholding food as punishment, but would ask them not to tell his "mom" that he was visiting, Ms. DeKalb said. When she asked which mother, he explained that in that location was "Mom and Sarah" — and that "Mom" was responsible for the abuse. Sarah "didn't used to go along with it," Devonte told Ms. DeKalb, merely was now "tolerating" Jennifer'due south beliefs.
"I absolutely, from the lesser of my centre, trust what he said," Ms. DeKalb added.
Devonte also asked that the DeKalbs non call the police considering he feared the family would go split up. But later in March, Ms. DeKalb told him she was going to. The adjacent night, when Devonte visited, she said he asked, "Take you called still?"
Ms. DeKalb contacted the country's child welfare bureau the next morn, Friday, March 23, 2018.
She would later grapple with a nighttime thought: "Because I reported, they took off and killed these kids."
Concerned co-workers
Paradigm
There was nothing unusual about Sarah's behavior that Fri, one of her co-workers at Kohl's told investigators. Only several colleagues would afterwards recall that she had previously fabricated odd complaints near her children and became visibly distraught when taking calls from her wife.
Sarah told them that her children "could not part on their own," had "food issues" and were not allowed in the kitchen.
An banana manager also said Sarah "would exist very concerned" if Jennifer texted or called her at piece of work, sometimes exiting the room in a panic and fierce up during heated phone calls.
Sarah told that manager that Jennifer struggled with depression and mentioned to some other co-worker that Jennifer "would stay in bed and cry all the time." A close relative of Jennifer's was said to have "concerns well-nigh Jennifer's state of mind," documents show.
The banana manager told the government about a chat with Sarah that stood out: Sarah in one case said she wished that someone had "told her it was O.K. non to take a big family."
"Then," Sarah told her dominate, "she and Jennifer would not have adopted the children."
Fifty-fifty with and so much going on at dwelling, a manager told investigators, Sarah had "never failed to bear witness upwards for work."
Video reviewed by investigators showed Sarah Hart leaving Kohl'south around 5:26 p.grand. on March 23 in a white Pontiac. A kid welfare official responding to Ms. DeKalb's telephone call that morning arrived at the Hart home about 10 minutes before that and saw a gold S.U.V. come the driveway and pull up to the Hart habitation, according to a written report. So the caseworker knocked on the front door. No answer. She left her business organization card.
Just before three a.m. the side by side twenty-four hours, records bear witness, Sarah Hart texted at to the lowest degree iii co-workers: "I thought I would exist able to go to work but I'chiliad too sick to come in."
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The authorities afterwards reviewed video of what appears to be Jennifer at a Safeway on the morning of Sunday, March 25. The supermarket was about 25 miles from the Juan Creek crossing on Highway 1.
Investigators returned to the Harts' home in Washington Country the adjacent day. The gold S.U.Five. was gone; a German tourist would spot it a few hours later, upside downward on a rocky shoreline, more than than 500 miles down the Pacific Coast.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/us/family-drives-off-cliff-jennifer-sarah-hart.html
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