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We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America
The shocking, deeply reported story of a murder-suicide that claimed the lives of six children—and a searing indictment of the American foster care system.
On March 26, 2018, rescue workers discovered a crumpled SUV and the bodies of two women and several children at the bottom of a cliff beside the Pacific Coast Highway. Investigators soon concluded that the crash was a murder-suicide, but there was more to the story: Jennifer and Sarah Hart, it turned out, were a white married couple who had adopted the six Black children from two different Texas families in 2006 and 2008. Behind the family's loving facade, however, was a pattern of abuse and neglect that went ignored as the couple withdrew the children from school and moved across the country. It soon became apparent that the State of Texas knew very little about the two individuals to whom it had given custody of six children—with fateful consequences.
In the manner of Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family and other classic works of investigative journalism, Roxanna Asgarian’s We Were Once a Family is a revelation of vulnerable lives; it is also a shattering exposé of the foster care and adoption systems that produced this tragedy. As a journalist in Houston, Asgarian became the first reporter to put the children’s birth families at the center of the story. We follow the author as she runs up against the intransigence of a state agency that removes tens of thousands of kids from homes each year in the name of child welfare, while often failing to consider alternatives. Her reporting uncovers persistent racial biases and corruption as children of color are separated from birth parents without proper cause. The result is a riveting narrative and a deeply reported indictment of a system that continues to fail America’s most vulnerable children while upending the lives of their families.
On March 26, 2018, rescue workers discovered a crumpled SUV and the bodies of two women and several children at the bottom of a cliff beside the Pacific Coast Highway. Investigators soon concluded that the crash was a murder-suicide, but there was more to the story: Jennifer and Sarah Hart, it turned out, were a white married couple who had adopted the six Black children from two different Texas families in 2006 and 2008. Behind the family's loving facade, however, was a pattern of abuse and neglect that went ignored as the couple withdrew the children from school and moved across the country. It soon became apparent that the State of Texas knew very little about the two individuals to whom it had given custody of six children—with fateful consequences.
In the manner of Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family and other classic works of investigative journalism, Roxanna Asgarian’s We Were Once a Family is a revelation of vulnerable lives; it is also a shattering exposé of the foster care and adoption systems that produced this tragedy. As a journalist in Houston, Asgarian became the first reporter to put the children’s birth families at the center of the story. We follow the author as she runs up against the intransigence of a state agency that removes tens of thousands of kids from homes each year in the name of child welfare, while often failing to consider alternatives. Her reporting uncovers persistent racial biases and corruption as children of color are separated from birth parents without proper cause. The result is a riveting narrative and a deeply reported indictment of a system that continues to fail America’s most vulnerable children while upending the lives of their families.
8 pages, Audiobook
First published March 14, 2023
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About the author
Roxanna Asgarian
1 book101 followersRoxanna Asgarian is a Texas-based independent journalist who writes about child welfare and the law. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, New York, and Texas Monthly, among other publications. She received the 2022 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award for We Were Once a Family.
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May 6, 2023
We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America – Roxanna Asgarian – 2023 –
The tragic deaths involving a family of eight and the failure of state child welfare agencies that failed to protect the adopted children involved: Markis,19; Hanna, 16; Devonte, 15; Jeremiah, 14; Abigail, 14; Ciera, 12; is the focus of this critical and disturbing narrative. On March 26, 2018 California state investigators found the wreckage of a family SUV along the Pacific Coast Highway. The driver of the car had accelerated, no skid marks were found, huge amounts of Benadryl were listed in toxicology reports of the children’s bodies. The crash and deaths were a deliberate act and determined to be a murder-suicide by the adoptive parents Sara and Jennifer Hart.
The massive media coverage that followed was intense. Roxanna Asgarian, a court journalist for The Texas Tribune, (Houston) studied and researched the Hart adoption case for nearly five years for this book. She was placed in an unfortunate position to tell the birth families in Texas of their children’s deaths, they were never informed. The children were forcibly removed from their birth families in Texas (2006-08) and child custody rights were immediately terminated. The Adoption and Safe Families Act (1997) that required a family reunification plan with minimal time spent in foster care was blatantly disregarded and ignored by state officials. The children were placed on the Texas Adoption Resource Exchange for fast-track adoption as soon as possible. It was never determined why a white out of state lesbian couple would be more suitable parents for six traumatized children of color some with learning disabilities and all with a great need for health, social, and educational support services.
Before the children were withdrawn from public schools, the Hart’s were reported to Child Protective Services six times between 2010-11 and in that time frame Sara Hart was charged with Domestic Violence and received a 90-day suspended sentence with a year’s probation. The Hart’s may have avoided further notice and questioning by child welfare agencies by moving the children from Minnesota to Oregon and Washington state. At the time of the tragedy, a new investigation of the Hart’s had been launched by CPS. There were few records of the children receiving any medical, dental, or educational services. Since the Harts were receiving about half of their family income from the state of Texas adoption subsidies, there should have more accountability and stringent verification and welfare checks into status of the children’s health and safety with federal, state or government agencies.
The state of Texas excessively claimed federal funds for adoption placement services, and seemed to provide inadequate funding for state residential treatment centers (RTC’s) that largely provided services for foster children, at risk youth, and/or wards of the state. Social workers, child experts and advocates agree that RTC’s are not the best placements for children/youth/teens yet they serve a necessary and needed purpose. As a nation, our public officials and law makers often fail to invest the needed funding for child and family services—our national “safety net” is threadbare (when compared to the spending of other developed countries and nations) it remains disgraceful. Through this book readers have a clear understanding of child removal and how outcomes can change or be improved. Our future as a nation depends on it. **With thanks to Farrar Strauss and Giroux for the DDC for the purpose of review.
The tragic deaths involving a family of eight and the failure of state child welfare agencies that failed to protect the adopted children involved: Markis,19; Hanna, 16; Devonte, 15; Jeremiah, 14; Abigail, 14; Ciera, 12; is the focus of this critical and disturbing narrative. On March 26, 2018 California state investigators found the wreckage of a family SUV along the Pacific Coast Highway. The driver of the car had accelerated, no skid marks were found, huge amounts of Benadryl were listed in toxicology reports of the children’s bodies. The crash and deaths were a deliberate act and determined to be a murder-suicide by the adoptive parents Sara and Jennifer Hart.
The massive media coverage that followed was intense. Roxanna Asgarian, a court journalist for The Texas Tribune, (Houston) studied and researched the Hart adoption case for nearly five years for this book. She was placed in an unfortunate position to tell the birth families in Texas of their children’s deaths, they were never informed. The children were forcibly removed from their birth families in Texas (2006-08) and child custody rights were immediately terminated. The Adoption and Safe Families Act (1997) that required a family reunification plan with minimal time spent in foster care was blatantly disregarded and ignored by state officials. The children were placed on the Texas Adoption Resource Exchange for fast-track adoption as soon as possible. It was never determined why a white out of state lesbian couple would be more suitable parents for six traumatized children of color some with learning disabilities and all with a great need for health, social, and educational support services.
Before the children were withdrawn from public schools, the Hart’s were reported to Child Protective Services six times between 2010-11 and in that time frame Sara Hart was charged with Domestic Violence and received a 90-day suspended sentence with a year’s probation. The Hart’s may have avoided further notice and questioning by child welfare agencies by moving the children from Minnesota to Oregon and Washington state. At the time of the tragedy, a new investigation of the Hart’s had been launched by CPS. There were few records of the children receiving any medical, dental, or educational services. Since the Harts were receiving about half of their family income from the state of Texas adoption subsidies, there should have more accountability and stringent verification and welfare checks into status of the children’s health and safety with federal, state or government agencies.
The state of Texas excessively claimed federal funds for adoption placement services, and seemed to provide inadequate funding for state residential treatment centers (RTC’s) that largely provided services for foster children, at risk youth, and/or wards of the state. Social workers, child experts and advocates agree that RTC’s are not the best placements for children/youth/teens yet they serve a necessary and needed purpose. As a nation, our public officials and law makers often fail to invest the needed funding for child and family services—our national “safety net” is threadbare (when compared to the spending of other developed countries and nations) it remains disgraceful. Through this book readers have a clear understanding of child removal and how outcomes can change or be improved. Our future as a nation depends on it. **With thanks to Farrar Strauss and Giroux for the DDC for the purpose of review.
September 13, 2022
This is 5 star journalism! I’m in awe honestly. I was interested in this story because I’ve had a few friends online tell horrific adoption stories lately and I only knew what we’ve all been told, that adoptive parents are angels and that the terrible, awful, no-good parents just didn’t want their kids. I didn’t realize at the time that I’d heard this story! The Hart family, two moms, and six adopted kids went off a cliff and apparently it was on purpose. It fell out of the news, at least the news I watch, pretty quickly and I hadn’t really thought about it. Just evil, open and shut case. Wow, was I wrong. There is SO much going on here.
The Harts, Jennifer and Sarah(white women; a couple), adopted six kids(all black or mixed race). The kids are two sets of siblings, both sets begin 3 from each family. On the outside it looks kind. Siblings being able to stick together and Jennifer took every opportunity to toot her own horn on Facebook.
Let’s just be frank, these children were stolen from families that wanted them because they were poor(being poor is often mistaken for neglect) and given to abusers who looked better on paper. I had no idea how hard they fought to keep them. It’s absolutely heartbreaking and if it doesn’t show you there is a systemic issue, I don’t know what will. The generational trauma revealed in this book is absolutely harrowing.
This author, a journalist, took the time to get the whole story and to know all of the people involved, warts and all. She is not playing armchair psychologist and this isn’t a cutesy true crime book where she’s trying to get in the mind of these disgusting murderers. Her goal is to shed light on the children, share the stories of their families, and indict the system that failed them all.
These kids were living an absolute nightmare and they were failed by every person meant to protect them. The bio families were punished at every turn and the adoptive moms(faux white saviors) were given every benefit of the doubt and opportunity. It’s unfair and quite frankly, it’s racist. At best, it’s classist. I’m not saying the families are blameless but the systems put in place to help should actually help and not cause more harm because that’s their job.
This is especially important to hear right now because with the overturning of Roe, I’m going to take a wild guess and say these systems will be under even more pressure than they already are.
I don’t know how many times I need to say this, not everyone deserves a child just because they can’t birth one on their own. Keeping the child with family should always be the first priority. It seems counterproductive to pay someone to foster or adopt when you could use those funds, and probably less honestly, to help the mom keep their child.
After the book, I watched a documentary and an ID show about it. I just wanted to put faces to names because this really touched me. This story is going to stick with me and I appreciate the journalist for what she put into this. At a time when the media isn’t portrayed in the best light, it’s refreshing to see a good journalist out there doing the real work.
Thank you to NetGalley, the author, and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review.
The Harts, Jennifer and Sarah(white women; a couple), adopted six kids(all black or mixed race). The kids are two sets of siblings, both sets begin 3 from each family. On the outside it looks kind. Siblings being able to stick together and Jennifer took every opportunity to toot her own horn on Facebook.
Let’s just be frank, these children were stolen from families that wanted them because they were poor(being poor is often mistaken for neglect) and given to abusers who looked better on paper. I had no idea how hard they fought to keep them. It’s absolutely heartbreaking and if it doesn’t show you there is a systemic issue, I don’t know what will. The generational trauma revealed in this book is absolutely harrowing.
This author, a journalist, took the time to get the whole story and to know all of the people involved, warts and all. She is not playing armchair psychologist and this isn’t a cutesy true crime book where she’s trying to get in the mind of these disgusting murderers. Her goal is to shed light on the children, share the stories of their families, and indict the system that failed them all.
These kids were living an absolute nightmare and they were failed by every person meant to protect them. The bio families were punished at every turn and the adoptive moms(faux white saviors) were given every benefit of the doubt and opportunity. It’s unfair and quite frankly, it’s racist. At best, it’s classist. I’m not saying the families are blameless but the systems put in place to help should actually help and not cause more harm because that’s their job.
This is especially important to hear right now because with the overturning of Roe, I’m going to take a wild guess and say these systems will be under even more pressure than they already are.
I don’t know how many times I need to say this, not everyone deserves a child just because they can’t birth one on their own. Keeping the child with family should always be the first priority. It seems counterproductive to pay someone to foster or adopt when you could use those funds, and probably less honestly, to help the mom keep their child.
After the book, I watched a documentary and an ID show about it. I just wanted to put faces to names because this really touched me. This story is going to stick with me and I appreciate the journalist for what she put into this. At a time when the media isn’t portrayed in the best light, it’s refreshing to see a good journalist out there doing the real work.
Thank you to NetGalley, the author, and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review.
June 27, 2023
A thoughtful and well-researched book about the foster care and adoption system in the United States, centering the story of two white women who adopted six Black children and proceeded to kill them all in a tragic murder/suicide. Roxanna Asgarian did a great job of discussing the nuances of transracial adoption and highlighting the privilege and abuses of power white adoptive parents can enact, in controlled yet effective prose. I was struck while reading her descriptions of this case about how we often stereotype white women as fragile or dainty or needing of care and protection, which can then obscure instances of when they perpetuate racism such as in this case.
At the same time, Asgarian makes sure to also focus on the six children and their birth families, to not just provide perspective on the two white women in this tragedy. She discusses their experiences with the foster care system and the racism they faced time and time again. Through her journalism and reporting, she makes a convincing case for addressing the root systemic inequities that perpetuate racism and the disempowerment of birth families, particularly Black and brown birth families facing poverty, addiction, and mental illness. All in all, We Were Once a Family is a harrowing and ultimately necessary read.
At the same time, Asgarian makes sure to also focus on the six children and their birth families, to not just provide perspective on the two white women in this tragedy. She discusses their experiences with the foster care system and the racism they faced time and time again. Through her journalism and reporting, she makes a convincing case for addressing the root systemic inequities that perpetuate racism and the disempowerment of birth families, particularly Black and brown birth families facing poverty, addiction, and mental illness. All in all, We Were Once a Family is a harrowing and ultimately necessary read.
July 18, 2024
Non-fiction November
There are a myriad of problems with transracial adoption. Adoptees already grow up with a plethora of problems, before you add in the issue of race.
In this worst case scenario, a white married couple who adopted six Black children from two different Texas families commits murder-suicide, thus ruining the children's only chance at happiness and survival.
According to family and case workers, there were signs of abuse. Why didn't anyone go in and help? Why weren't these children placed with family members?
🎧 Thank you to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio
There are a myriad of problems with transracial adoption. Adoptees already grow up with a plethora of problems, before you add in the issue of race.
In this worst case scenario, a white married couple who adopted six Black children from two different Texas families commits murder-suicide, thus ruining the children's only chance at happiness and survival.
According to family and case workers, there were signs of abuse. Why didn't anyone go in and help? Why weren't these children placed with family members?
🎧 Thank you to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio
April 4, 2023
This is one of the best things I've read this year. The storytelling, the research, the writing, it is all so so so good. This story is heartbreaking and not easy to read but this book is worthy. These kids and their families deserved better and in writing this book Asgarian gave them a chance. You must read this book.
March 30, 2023
Audiobook….read by Suehyla El-Attar
…..7 hours and 34 minutes
“WHO HAS POWER AND WHO DOESN’T”?
Journalist, Suehyla El-Attar deserves every award she’s considered for and more for the five years of her meticulous investigation and research….
[read the blurb if you don’t know what I’m referring to]
The basic facts…
….March 26, 2018, was a murder-suicide.
….Six adopted Black children from two different families in Texas had died… along with
Sarah and Jennifer Hart, a married white couple, who adopted the children.
….Rescue workers discovered a crumbled SUV, and the bodies of two women and several children at the bottom of a cliff besides the Pacific Coast Highway.
The Bottom Line…
….A HORRIFIC CRIME ….devastating and sad as hell!!!
….the more details we learn, it makes one so damn furious, it’s almost too much to contain.
….SOOOO MANY RED FLAG WARNINGS… about Jennifer and Sarah Hart were ignored!!
….a look at how poverty, neglect, trauma, child abuse, racism, prejudice and injustice of all kinds, and violence — CONTINUES to FAIL children.
….WE NEED MORE …functional - superb - AWAKE - child welfare workers - to keep children from harmful abuse and neglect.
It’s sooo complicated and painful when a mother has substance abuse and the children are removed into a foster care program and or adopted—only to be treated inhumanly— and murdered?/!!!
Roxanna Asgarian, an advocate for children’s rights their safety, and permanency ….almost single-handedly, took on this case — to uncover the TRUTHS ….
“we have a racist child welfare system”.
There are times when we say “THIS IS AN IMPORTANT BOOK” …..and
“THIS IS A CAUSE WORTH ADVOCATING FOR”…..
Well,
THIS IS!!!! > THAT BOOK!
DYSFUNCTIONAL child welfare system has been EXPOSED!!!
We can not NOT SEE the truth!!!
There are many personal and detail stories in here…
Blessings to the children -
RIP: Ciera, Abigail, Jeremiah, Devonte, Hannah, and Markis
And ….
the big message is we must SYSTEMICALLY PROTECT OUR CHILDREN!!
Calling for child welfare system REFORM!!!
…..7 hours and 34 minutes
“WHO HAS POWER AND WHO DOESN’T”?
Journalist, Suehyla El-Attar deserves every award she’s considered for and more for the five years of her meticulous investigation and research….
[read the blurb if you don’t know what I’m referring to]
The basic facts…
….March 26, 2018, was a murder-suicide.
….Six adopted Black children from two different families in Texas had died… along with
Sarah and Jennifer Hart, a married white couple, who adopted the children.
….Rescue workers discovered a crumbled SUV, and the bodies of two women and several children at the bottom of a cliff besides the Pacific Coast Highway.
The Bottom Line…
….A HORRIFIC CRIME ….devastating and sad as hell!!!
….the more details we learn, it makes one so damn furious, it’s almost too much to contain.
….SOOOO MANY RED FLAG WARNINGS… about Jennifer and Sarah Hart were ignored!!
….a look at how poverty, neglect, trauma, child abuse, racism, prejudice and injustice of all kinds, and violence — CONTINUES to FAIL children.
….WE NEED MORE …functional - superb - AWAKE - child welfare workers - to keep children from harmful abuse and neglect.
It’s sooo complicated and painful when a mother has substance abuse and the children are removed into a foster care program and or adopted—only to be treated inhumanly— and murdered?/!!!
Roxanna Asgarian, an advocate for children’s rights their safety, and permanency ….almost single-handedly, took on this case — to uncover the TRUTHS ….
“we have a racist child welfare system”.
There are times when we say “THIS IS AN IMPORTANT BOOK” …..and
“THIS IS A CAUSE WORTH ADVOCATING FOR”…..
Well,
THIS IS!!!! > THAT BOOK!
DYSFUNCTIONAL child welfare system has been EXPOSED!!!
We can not NOT SEE the truth!!!
There are many personal and detail stories in here…
Blessings to the children -
RIP: Ciera, Abigail, Jeremiah, Devonte, Hannah, and Markis
And ….
the big message is we must SYSTEMICALLY PROTECT OUR CHILDREN!!
Calling for child welfare system REFORM!!!
June 23, 2025
I started listening to We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America on audiobook through the Libby app, but it kept repeating the Prologue, so I switched to the hard copy book.
The book is about the tragic death on March 26, 2018, of Jennifer and Sarah Hart and their six adopted children. Their SUV went over a cliff along the Pacific Coast Highway. Author, Roxanna Asgarian, focuses her investigative, immersive journalist approach to the many failures of our nation's adoption and foster care processes.
It's a raw, tragic, terrifying look into how we fail children and also how we fail adults and families who need help.
The book is about the tragic death on March 26, 2018, of Jennifer and Sarah Hart and their six adopted children. Their SUV went over a cliff along the Pacific Coast Highway. Author, Roxanna Asgarian, focuses her investigative, immersive journalist approach to the many failures of our nation's adoption and foster care processes.
It's a raw, tragic, terrifying look into how we fail children and also how we fail adults and families who need help.
May 18, 2023
One of the most valuable, and most gutting, books I have read. Asgarian dives deep into the well-publicized story of 6 Black and mixed-race children murdered by their abusive adoptive White mothers, Jennifer and Sarah Hart. This is not an opportunity to gawk, but a searing look at the way in which the foster care system in many places, and especially in Harris County Texas, acts against the interests of children in the system. People in positions of authority penalize lawyers and caseworkers who try to keep families together. Those same people rig the system so that children are carelessly snatched from Black families while trying desperately to not see or acknowledge clear evidence of abuse when parents are White. I cannot imagine anyone would not be outraged by the way Texas took children from families equipped to care for them, and desperate to care for them, in order to draw down federal funds by removing children, terminating parental rights, and shipping these children to other states. These people in Texas and other places created a cottage industry by selling vulnerable children. The evidence of the ways in which the system conflates poverty and neglect to justify ripping children from their families is also maddening.
Perhaps Asgarian's greatest accomplishment is showing the ways in which the child protection system punished and misrepresented the actions of the loving stable members of the birth families of these six children. They did so in order to send these kids to a home where they were horrifically abused and eventually murdered by their adoptive parents. That same system gave the White adoptive mothers the benefit of the doubt time after time even after complaints were made to Child Protective Services in three different states by teachers and neighbors. Eventually those complaints caught up with the Harts, but it took years during which 6 children were starved and tortured. Even when the abuse allegations caught up with the Harts, officials gave the women enough of a warning that they could get a head start long enough to murder the children and kill themselves.
This is an engrossing and powerful read which gave me information I need to make me a better citizen. I took a star from the rating because Asgarian interprets a lot of data in ways that are intended to support her thesis rather than inform. She is clear that she is not writing this as a true journalist because she has not kept her distance, she has become entangled with these families, so I did not expect things to be even-handed and I was theoretically okay with that. However, it was clear to me that Asgarian stopped asking good questions about the meaning of data on foster/non-family adoption outcomes vs. children who stay with family members. She is too smart, too analytical, to not know what she is doing here. She blames many things on fostering and adoption that might easily be the result of the unstable environments and nutritional and medical want children in the child welfare system have often experienced in the homes of bio parents. She also sees things from an "abolish" perspective when common sense should tell us that we need a child welfare system, just not the one we have built.
In the end the book asks some great questions about how we define good parenting in a culturally chauvinistic way and also effectively shows the ways in which race, class and wealth impact parents' interactions with the system in ways that are harming and killing our most vulnerable children. Highly recommended.
Perhaps Asgarian's greatest accomplishment is showing the ways in which the child protection system punished and misrepresented the actions of the loving stable members of the birth families of these six children. They did so in order to send these kids to a home where they were horrifically abused and eventually murdered by their adoptive parents. That same system gave the White adoptive mothers the benefit of the doubt time after time even after complaints were made to Child Protective Services in three different states by teachers and neighbors. Eventually those complaints caught up with the Harts, but it took years during which 6 children were starved and tortured. Even when the abuse allegations caught up with the Harts, officials gave the women enough of a warning that they could get a head start long enough to murder the children and kill themselves.
This is an engrossing and powerful read which gave me information I need to make me a better citizen. I took a star from the rating because Asgarian interprets a lot of data in ways that are intended to support her thesis rather than inform. She is clear that she is not writing this as a true journalist because she has not kept her distance, she has become entangled with these families, so I did not expect things to be even-handed and I was theoretically okay with that. However, it was clear to me that Asgarian stopped asking good questions about the meaning of data on foster/non-family adoption outcomes vs. children who stay with family members. She is too smart, too analytical, to not know what she is doing here. She blames many things on fostering and adoption that might easily be the result of the unstable environments and nutritional and medical want children in the child welfare system have often experienced in the homes of bio parents. She also sees things from an "abolish" perspective when common sense should tell us that we need a child welfare system, just not the one we have built.
In the end the book asks some great questions about how we define good parenting in a culturally chauvinistic way and also effectively shows the ways in which race, class and wealth impact parents' interactions with the system in ways that are harming and killing our most vulnerable children. Highly recommended.
March 21, 2023
Thanks to NetGalley and MacMillan Audio for the opportunity to listen to this advanced copy. All opinions are my own.
I was very interested in this book coming from a background of working for almost a decade in children’s protective services. I understand that there are bad workers and bad foster parents just as there are really amazing ones and that situations like this do happen. I was interested to hear what led to this event and learn if it was a negligence thing on the part of CPS workers or a mental break of the adoptive parents or what exactly happened. I was expecting a true crime type book involving a protective service case/adoptive family. What I wasn’t expecting was a complete rant about the failures of the entire child protective service field with skewed statistics to prove those points. I know for most people they would read/listen and take this as unbiased fact with the way it is presented and for the general public that hasn’t worked in that field that may lead to enjoying this book more than I did.
I was very interested in this book coming from a background of working for almost a decade in children’s protective services. I understand that there are bad workers and bad foster parents just as there are really amazing ones and that situations like this do happen. I was interested to hear what led to this event and learn if it was a negligence thing on the part of CPS workers or a mental break of the adoptive parents or what exactly happened. I was expecting a true crime type book involving a protective service case/adoptive family. What I wasn’t expecting was a complete rant about the failures of the entire child protective service field with skewed statistics to prove those points. I know for most people they would read/listen and take this as unbiased fact with the way it is presented and for the general public that hasn’t worked in that field that may lead to enjoying this book more than I did.
March 18, 2023
This book should be mandatory reading for anyone involved in child protection - lawyers, judges and social workers. I was floored by what was allowed in this situation. We have a flawed system of child protection in this country that is tightly tied to the systemic racism that exists in our nation.
My heart breaks for the children and their birth families. We need to have a system that learns how to support families. I don’t know if that is possible but we, as a nation, need to do a better job of trying to make it happen.
My heart breaks for the children and their birth families. We need to have a system that learns how to support families. I don’t know if that is possible but we, as a nation, need to do a better job of trying to make it happen.
March 30, 2023
In depth book
She did a great job with a gut wrenching story. Following the heartbreaking whys behind the Hart family children's deaths is just heartbreaking.
Reading about the foster care system and CPS will make you furious.
Full review:
You all probably recall this story. Back in 2018 we all read about how two women who were married drove their van off a cliff in California instantly killing themselves and their 6 adopted children. And then of course, people realized that one of the children, was the boy whose photo went viral for hugging (and crying) a police officer with a sign that said free hugs. FYI, I hated that freaking photo the first time I saw it. Not too derail too much in this review, but I remember going why are people acting like this is good? That child looks traumatized? Why would his mother even allow this. And when I saw more posts from the boy's mother, Jennifer, I just felt very....this woman seems to see this child and the rest of them as props. I was devastated when I heard about the children's death, but got really ticked off when I read all of the ins and outs of this case and how after repeated calls to CPS by teachers, neighbors, and even friends of the Hart women (Jennifer and Sarah) the children were not removed from their home.
I have to say that the author Roxanna Asgarian did a wonderful job with this book. She clearly lays out the backstory of the Hart family: Ciera (aged 12), Abigail (14), Jeremiah (14), Devonte (15), Hannah (16), and Markis (19). Asgarian follows what led each of the children to become part of the Texas foster care system and how they were eventually adopted by Jennifer and Sarah Hart.
I think foremost, Asgarian deserves kudos. Because most of the articles and even that one [terrible] podcast did not dive deep enough into this for me. They either gave sympathy to Jennifer and Sarah, or implied that both women were at the end of their rope trying to care for 6 children. And then the subtle this is the birth family's fault that they ended up in foster care. There was a documentary that I think did the best in-depth dive into this ugliness called, Broken Harts which actually tackled the foster care system in the U.S. and how CPS seems inclined to ignore reports of neglect and abuse by white families. This book also takes a hard look at trans-racial adoption and all of the stumbling blocks with that along with the system that allowed this tragedy to occur.
Asgarian starts off with giving us the backstory of 3 of the children who were taken away from their birth mother, Sherry, Ciera, Devonte, and Jeremiah. Reading about Sherry and her struggles, and the man who considered himself the father of all of her children was heart wrenching. I also felt myself baffled when we find out why the children were taken away from the home they were all living in with their older brother Dontay (who was never adopted) because their birth mother had given up her rights to them, she technically was not allowed to be around them again. When she stayed overnight to watch the kids, a CPS worker found her there and her supervisor told the worker to remove the children because they were in harm's way. The foster mother (relation to the kids through their actual birth father) tried to get the children back, but was blocked. And instead they were eventually adopted by Jennifer and Sarah.
The backstory of the other three children, Abigail, Hannah, and Markis was just as sad.
Asgarian does a great job of also following Dontay's struggles with being in the system and wanting to be back with his family and his brothers and sisters. Feeling as if there is something wrong with him and knowing those in charge, don't care, and won't do anything.
I think the book also does a great job of showing us the backstory of Jennifer and Sarah, and how Jennifer isolated her and then their children. The story of their first and only foster child should have rang some alarm bells and I felt so sorry for this young woman. And then of course as the women get the first 3 children, there are already allegations. But it seems even though Abigail was found to have bruises, and Sarah pled guilty to assaulting her (yep you read that) she just got a year's worth of community service.
Yes, you read that right again, a year's worth of community service.
As I said above, there were allegations by a lot of people, even friends of these two women, and the most that seemed to occur was CPS leaving a card. You of course can be cynical like me and wonder if the fact that two white women adopted six black children meant that CPS was reluctant to do much.
The aftermath of the children's deaths is just as upsetting as what went before. The birth family's are left reeling, and in the case of one of the women's families, denial seems to be rampant.
Asgarian includes along with these details, information about judges, lawyers, the CPS system, history behind some laws, and also as I said the struggles with transracial adoption. I thought this was a solid book, but a very hard read. There is no happy ending. And you just wish things had gone differently for everyone.
She did a great job with a gut wrenching story. Following the heartbreaking whys behind the Hart family children's deaths is just heartbreaking.
Reading about the foster care system and CPS will make you furious.
Full review:
You all probably recall this story. Back in 2018 we all read about how two women who were married drove their van off a cliff in California instantly killing themselves and their 6 adopted children. And then of course, people realized that one of the children, was the boy whose photo went viral for hugging (and crying) a police officer with a sign that said free hugs. FYI, I hated that freaking photo the first time I saw it. Not too derail too much in this review, but I remember going why are people acting like this is good? That child looks traumatized? Why would his mother even allow this. And when I saw more posts from the boy's mother, Jennifer, I just felt very....this woman seems to see this child and the rest of them as props. I was devastated when I heard about the children's death, but got really ticked off when I read all of the ins and outs of this case and how after repeated calls to CPS by teachers, neighbors, and even friends of the Hart women (Jennifer and Sarah) the children were not removed from their home.
I have to say that the author Roxanna Asgarian did a wonderful job with this book. She clearly lays out the backstory of the Hart family: Ciera (aged 12), Abigail (14), Jeremiah (14), Devonte (15), Hannah (16), and Markis (19). Asgarian follows what led each of the children to become part of the Texas foster care system and how they were eventually adopted by Jennifer and Sarah Hart.
I think foremost, Asgarian deserves kudos. Because most of the articles and even that one [terrible] podcast did not dive deep enough into this for me. They either gave sympathy to Jennifer and Sarah, or implied that both women were at the end of their rope trying to care for 6 children. And then the subtle this is the birth family's fault that they ended up in foster care. There was a documentary that I think did the best in-depth dive into this ugliness called, Broken Harts which actually tackled the foster care system in the U.S. and how CPS seems inclined to ignore reports of neglect and abuse by white families. This book also takes a hard look at trans-racial adoption and all of the stumbling blocks with that along with the system that allowed this tragedy to occur.
Asgarian starts off with giving us the backstory of 3 of the children who were taken away from their birth mother, Sherry, Ciera, Devonte, and Jeremiah. Reading about Sherry and her struggles, and the man who considered himself the father of all of her children was heart wrenching. I also felt myself baffled when we find out why the children were taken away from the home they were all living in with their older brother Dontay (who was never adopted) because their birth mother had given up her rights to them, she technically was not allowed to be around them again. When she stayed overnight to watch the kids, a CPS worker found her there and her supervisor told the worker to remove the children because they were in harm's way. The foster mother (relation to the kids through their actual birth father) tried to get the children back, but was blocked. And instead they were eventually adopted by Jennifer and Sarah.
The backstory of the other three children, Abigail, Hannah, and Markis was just as sad.
Asgarian does a great job of also following Dontay's struggles with being in the system and wanting to be back with his family and his brothers and sisters. Feeling as if there is something wrong with him and knowing those in charge, don't care, and won't do anything.
I think the book also does a great job of showing us the backstory of Jennifer and Sarah, and how Jennifer isolated her and then their children. The story of their first and only foster child should have rang some alarm bells and I felt so sorry for this young woman. And then of course as the women get the first 3 children, there are already allegations. But it seems even though Abigail was found to have bruises, and Sarah pled guilty to assaulting her (yep you read that) she just got a year's worth of community service.
Yes, you read that right again, a year's worth of community service.
As I said above, there were allegations by a lot of people, even friends of these two women, and the most that seemed to occur was CPS leaving a card. You of course can be cynical like me and wonder if the fact that two white women adopted six black children meant that CPS was reluctant to do much.
The aftermath of the children's deaths is just as upsetting as what went before. The birth family's are left reeling, and in the case of one of the women's families, denial seems to be rampant.
Asgarian includes along with these details, information about judges, lawyers, the CPS system, history behind some laws, and also as I said the struggles with transracial adoption. I thought this was a solid book, but a very hard read. There is no happy ending. And you just wish things had gone differently for everyone.
July 13, 2023
I hate to give this such a low rating, as I’m super in agreement with the author’s aims and purposes with regards to child welfare and adoption reforms, but holy hell did it need a better editor. This book is disorganised as all shit, at least fifty pages too short, and I was mentally rearranging chapter order as I read. There’s a compelling book in here, but it needed a tighter editorial hand. Also, there’s some off stuff about American conservative Protestantism that pinged my “that’s not correct” radar. Although I’m by no means a conservative Protestant, it’s a subject I know a fair bit about on an academic level, unlike the child welfare system. And when I come across inaccuracies about things I know a lot about, I’m always worried I’m missing other inaccuracies and oversimplifications on the subjects I don’t.
April 9, 2023
I feel as though this book was intended to be a history/evaluation of the child welfare system, but needed a more juicy hook in order to attract readers. That hook could be found in the story of the Hart family murders. This book is probably close to 85% child welfare system analyses and critiques, bio family histories, and statistics, and 15% the story of the Hart family. I believe the study of the child welfare system is important and necessary. However I also feel that the author likely knew that a true crime angle would increase number of readers.
March 15, 2023
This book has so much potential. I really wish the author had left politics, anti-Trump and the anti-cop propaganda out of it. Minus those things this book is a good read.
August 30, 2023
As a non-American, the whole concept of CPS is something of a national blind spot to me. This book was an eye-opener; it made me reconsider a lot of my preconceived notions and acknowledge the prejudices I never realized I held.
I would see news about CPS cases, happening thousands of miles away from me, and think "Well, as long as the children are happy... If it's the best for them..." but this book made me truly consider, for the first time, each and all of the variables in the family equation. The fact that children might not even know what would or could make them happy. Where can they find happiness? Who gets to decide what's best? How do they decide that? I can't even begin to think of the manifold of answers those heavy questions would bring and I certainly wouldn't like having to weigh those answers.
This book really forced me to put my accusatory instincts on hold in order to take a fuller picture, actively resist the tendency to oversimplify, and just sit with the understanding that these kind of things are never that fucking simple.
I would see news about CPS cases, happening thousands of miles away from me, and think "Well, as long as the children are happy... If it's the best for them..." but this book made me truly consider, for the first time, each and all of the variables in the family equation. The fact that children might not even know what would or could make them happy. Where can they find happiness? Who gets to decide what's best? How do they decide that? I can't even begin to think of the manifold of answers those heavy questions would bring and I certainly wouldn't like having to weigh those answers.
This book really forced me to put my accusatory instincts on hold in order to take a fuller picture, actively resist the tendency to oversimplify, and just sit with the understanding that these kind of things are never that fucking simple.
December 25, 2023
We Were Once a Family, A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America by Roxanna Asgarian and
Narrated by Suehyla El-Attar was a 5 ⭐️.
This was great! Difficult but great. I didn’t know about this crime and I’m glad in some ways that I didn’t. The author does an excellent job presenting all of the facts. I thought the narrator was perfect and highly recommend listening to it. Nothing is cut and dry about life and I realized after finishing that I need to hug my loved ones more. I can’t do this justice but I think you should read this. It’s life changing.
Thanks McMillan audio via NetGalley.
Narrated by Suehyla El-Attar was a 5 ⭐️.
This was great! Difficult but great. I didn’t know about this crime and I’m glad in some ways that I didn’t. The author does an excellent job presenting all of the facts. I thought the narrator was perfect and highly recommend listening to it. Nothing is cut and dry about life and I realized after finishing that I need to hug my loved ones more. I can’t do this justice but I think you should read this. It’s life changing.
Thanks McMillan audio via NetGalley.
December 9, 2023
This book covers such an important topic (the child welfare system ), and one adjacent to the field in which I’ve spent my professional career - I thought I would be all over it. However, as a couple other reviews have stated, I found the writing, editing, research/fact-checking, reasoning and conclusions drawn, and perhaps the tone just a bit lacking consistently throughout. I also agree that the Harts’ story seemed sort of minimally shoehorned in to sell the book. Definitely still consider reading this book or any other book about important social justice issues, especially those pertaining to child wellbeing - I’m just saying this one didn’t resound or ring as true with me as many others. The audio also was somewhat draining to follow.
June 6, 2023
I really wanted to like this book. The biological families so often get lost in these stories...and there's way too many of them. However, this book is so biased that it turns into a rant about her dysfunctional childhood and her opinion of the Houston family court system. She makes statements that basically say that an unstable home life with addicted neglectful parents is fine.
Don't get me wrong, she makes some good anecdotal points throughout. She completely loses me when she blames the system for a grown man's criminal choices, domestic violence, irresponsibility and not showing up for court in a fight to retain parental rights of his own child.
This could have been such a good book, but it's not.
Don't get me wrong, she makes some good anecdotal points throughout. She completely loses me when she blames the system for a grown man's criminal choices, domestic violence, irresponsibility and not showing up for court in a fight to retain parental rights of his own child.
This could have been such a good book, but it's not.
April 1, 2024
BookTube read. Review in April
August 24, 2023
4.5 stars
This was an exceptional book about that horrific event that happened off Hwy 1 in California a few years ago.
When I began reading this book, I did not remember the premise of the story. I often lend a dozen books from the library at a time so it wasn't until I was almost half way through this one that I remembered the story from the news and made the association. Of course the first half of the book was more than good enough to keep my attention span until the "mothers" showed up.
This book is in large part an indictment on the foster parenting system. This is especially true in Texas where they send a shocking number of children from Houston to other areas of the United States including Minnesota.
Glad I read it.
This was an exceptional book about that horrific event that happened off Hwy 1 in California a few years ago.
When I began reading this book, I did not remember the premise of the story. I often lend a dozen books from the library at a time so it wasn't until I was almost half way through this one that I remembered the story from the news and made the association. Of course the first half of the book was more than good enough to keep my attention span until the "mothers" showed up.
This book is in large part an indictment on the foster parenting system. This is especially true in Texas where they send a shocking number of children from Houston to other areas of the United States including Minnesota.
Glad I read it.
May 17, 2023
Very well researched and written in a detailed, yet engaging, manner. Asgarian has a lovely way of presenting a ton of information in an organized way, which helps readers keep everything straight.
I would've loved more details about the Hart family, specifically; this author used their case as a timely hook to sell a long-form investigative report on the American foster system. Asgarian admits that she has been fascinated with Child Protective Services for at least a decade, so I can't help but suspect that she felt a certain amount of shameful satisfaction when Jennifer and Sara Hart drove their SUV full of adopted kids off a cliff in 2018, making her passion project suddenly, intensely relevant. For someone who was able to dig up so much legal, procedural, personal and financial information about the American foster system, I was a little surprised Asgarian was unable to find more information about the Harts.
The problem with books like and including this one is they either offer simplistic solutions to ridiculously complex problems or don't offer any solutions at all. Asgarian is careful never to flat-out state that biological parents are always the best caregivers for their own children and the government should butt out beyond forking over cash and resources directly to broken families with the faith that they know best how to dig their way out of trouble... but she heavily implies it. While I agree that there are serious flaws with Child Protective Services, including its unabashed and ingrained racism, I disagree with the author's insinuation that the Hart children were safer with their biological families. (Obviously, they weren't safe with the Harts, either -- but those two opinions are not mutually exclusive.) Yes, this system is broken, but the solution isn't necessarily to allow kids to remain with drug-addled, inattentive, irresponsible parents. For example, at one point in the book, Asgarian heavily sympathizes with, and seemingly exonerates, a young mother who took her 3-year-old to a "party at a friend's house" and gave the toddler some punch that turned out to be laced with PCP. How was the woman supposed to know someone at the party spiked the punch?! It wasn't her fault that the child was poisoned and almost died! How ridiculous that the emergency workers were legally obligated to report the incident and the child was removed from her care!
This book was well written and compelling. Ultimately, it left me depressed and frustrated, which I'm 100% certain was its goal. In that regard, it's a smashing success.
I would've loved more details about the Hart family, specifically; this author used their case as a timely hook to sell a long-form investigative report on the American foster system. Asgarian admits that she has been fascinated with Child Protective Services for at least a decade, so I can't help but suspect that she felt a certain amount of shameful satisfaction when Jennifer and Sara Hart drove their SUV full of adopted kids off a cliff in 2018, making her passion project suddenly, intensely relevant. For someone who was able to dig up so much legal, procedural, personal and financial information about the American foster system, I was a little surprised Asgarian was unable to find more information about the Harts.
The problem with books like and including this one is they either offer simplistic solutions to ridiculously complex problems or don't offer any solutions at all. Asgarian is careful never to flat-out state that biological parents are always the best caregivers for their own children and the government should butt out beyond forking over cash and resources directly to broken families with the faith that they know best how to dig their way out of trouble... but she heavily implies it. While I agree that there are serious flaws with Child Protective Services, including its unabashed and ingrained racism, I disagree with the author's insinuation that the Hart children were safer with their biological families. (Obviously, they weren't safe with the Harts, either -- but those two opinions are not mutually exclusive.) Yes, this system is broken, but the solution isn't necessarily to allow kids to remain with drug-addled, inattentive, irresponsible parents. For example, at one point in the book, Asgarian heavily sympathizes with, and seemingly exonerates, a young mother who took her 3-year-old to a "party at a friend's house" and gave the toddler some punch that turned out to be laced with PCP. How was the woman supposed to know someone at the party spiked the punch?! It wasn't her fault that the child was poisoned and almost died! How ridiculous that the emergency workers were legally obligated to report the incident and the child was removed from her care!
This book was well written and compelling. Ultimately, it left me depressed and frustrated, which I'm 100% certain was its goal. In that regard, it's a smashing success.
November 3, 2022
I received a free copy of We Were Once a Family, by Roxanna Asgarian, from the publisher and Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Jennifer and Sarah Hart, fooled so many people, including the people who are supposed to protect foster children. The white couple, adopted colored children, they wanted a big family. Allegations of abuse and neglect were not always followed up.. These poor children were never protected, by the people meant to help them and love them. A well written book on such a tragic story that could of been prevented.
November 18, 2022
This is a very in-depth look at the story behind the headlines of the tragic deaths that were so in the news at the time. If you ever wanted to know more than the basic reporting when it happened, this is a really good book. It tells how the kids ended up with the Hart women, despite red flags. Also, it tells about some surprising laws and policies in place at the time that helped the situation happen.
December 29, 2024
Note: I read this book as part of my home library system’s Read More in 2024 Challenge. Challenge Prompt: Choose a title that has won an award within the last ten years.
This was a much needed counternarrative to an important story that has mostly fallen into the hands of true crime enthusiasts. In We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America; author Roxana Asgarian colors in much of the missing pieces of the lives of Markis, Hannah, Abigail, Devonte, Jeremiah, and Ciera; six Black and/or biracial young people who were removed from their biological families and extended communities in various parts of Texas. Unfortunately, most people came to know these teens and pre-teens in 2018, when they were tragically murdered by their adopted parents, Jennifer and Sarah Hart. The unusually disturbing nature of the Hart family murder-suicide has been the subject of true crime podcasts, as well as the inspiration for an episode of the comedy-drama series, Atlanta. I remember watching the first part of the Atlanta episode and immediately being sick to my stomach. (I did not finish the episode, but was later informed that the Atlanta version of the story does not result in family annihilation.) Even with the happier ending, I think the Atlanta episode exemplifies how most coverage of this story has either resulted in mockery, or failed to show adequate support for its true victims: the children and their birth families. In We Were Once a Family, Asgarian makes it her mission to provide less sensationalist coverage of Markis, Hannah, Abigail, Devonte, Jeremiah, and Ciera’s final years; and to provide more compassionate coverage of the Davis and Scheurich families.
Before I get into the review, I want to provide a bit of my own context (and blind spots) with Child Protective Services, foster care, adoption, child abuse, and everything else tied up in the family policing system. I come from an extended family where several adults (including my parents and maternal grandmother) were foster or adoptive parents at some point—this ranges from informal kinship placements to formal placements of non-relatives. Several people in my family also have traumatic histories of child abuse, very few of which have resulted in the involvement of CPS. In the instance I am most familiar with, my sibling and I saw a therapist who reported information we shared with her to CPS, something we never wanted to happen. My understanding is that CPS never investigated the therapist’s report, which probably has a lot to do with my immediate family’s class position. This “best-case scenario” of CPS involvement shows how my family’s darkest experiences have not been exacerbated by the trauma of child removal. As this book will show, this perverse privilege of privacy in your worst moments is not extended to many other Black families.
One of the major points Asgarian tries to make clear in We Were Once a Family is that Markis, Hannah, Abigail, Devonte, Jeremiah, and Ciera were not abused by their parents until they gained adoptive parents. Throughout the book, she showcases how all of the children were deeply loved by their birth parents and non-parental caregivers, all of whom wanted to provide these young people with great upbringings. These families were prevented from doing so due to a series of CPS “violations” and investigations that mostly had to do with claims of neglect. While neglect can be an intentional form of child abuse, in the case of these children, the neglect they experienced (or that CPS claimed they experienced) was mostly due to our society’s exploitation and deprivation of the poor. Many of the “violations” the kids’ parents and caregivers made could have been resolved by providing the adults with access to transportation, quality housing, and support for substance abuse.
Instead of providing any of these resources, the family policing system actively FOUGHT to remove these children from their communities. This is particularly true in the case of Devonte, Jeremiah, and Ciera; who had two relatives (their aunt, Priscilla and their chosen father, Nate) who were ready and able to take care of them. However, Asgarian reveals that the Harris County courts had significant financial incentives to terminate parental rights and sell children to adoptive families. This book’s explanation of the profit motives for the family policing system are infuriating and eye-opening. After learning that the adoption of foster youth is the cheapest option for queer parents *and* the most lucrative option for the state, everything starts to make sense in an awful way: why there aren’t more check-ins on adoptees, why there’s such a push to quickly terminate parental rights, and so on. At every point, the rights and interests of birth families are seen as less important, because their poverty is reframed as proof that they are unfit and undeserving parents, *and* because many powerful people have a financial or familial interest in removing these children. We Were Once a Family explains how this perfect storm of paternalism and profit results in a system that is constantly failing Black children.
This book has a lot to say about the failures of the family policing system, AND the failure of certain queer domestic systems. I am not sure how Asgarian identifies, but as a Black lesbian, this book made me think back to the 2020/21 conversations about how some queer people can leverage their citizenship and class status in ways that further oppression. This conversation particularly centered around the Black lesbian couple who were “expats” in Bali, which coincided with my reading of Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place. Due to this overlap, whenever I encounter queer “paradises” that rely on exploitation, I’m reminded of how Kincaid troubles the concept of paradise. In this case, Jennifer and Sarah Hart created their version of a lesbian domestic paradise thanks to the family policing system, and also their status as white women. Asgarian calls all the way back to the adoption histories of the very white Midwestern communities they grew up in, which were the main beneficiaries of the orphan trains that removed children in industrializing Northeastern cities from their families and sent them to “pioneers” in need of child labor. The book details how Jennifer and Sarah had internalized these sorts of legacies, and truly believed that they were “saving” the children from depraved upbringings in Texas. Asgarian refuses to dramatize the Harts’ vile abuse of Markis, Hannah, Abigail, Devonte, Jeremiah, and Ciera, but she does reveal how many witnesses to this abuse (including Jennifer and Sarah’s friends and various state caseworkers) were blinded by their own racism. These people bought the lesbian domestic paradise act the Harts were selling, seeing Jennifer and Sarah as tree-hugging galpals who were teaching their multicultural family to be vegan and rely on natural medicine. I was shocked by how many people seemed to keep up this narrative of Jennifer and Sarah as sweet, misguided girls even in the face of irrefutable evidence of what they’d done to the actual children!! Unfortunately, as Asgarian reveals, this sickening empathy for the Harts continued even after they murdered their “perfect hippie family”, and it is directly contrasted by the lack of empathy for the mostly non-white birth families.
I even had my own case of what Asgarian calls the “kids-glove treatment” of the Hart women. When reading articles about this case, I was certain that Sarah was being coerced by Jennifer, and was not a willing participant in the abuse of Markis, Hannah, Abigail, Devonte, Jeremiah, and Cierra. After reading this book, I agree with Asgarian’s argument that even if Jennifer was instigating the family dynamic, both women were still facilitators of child abuse. Again, I think the couple being lesbians matters here—I cannot tell you how many times my friends and I have shared our frustration at many straight people’s urges to typecast lesbian relationships, so the assumed “masc” partner becomes the abusive man, while the assumed “femme” partner is made out to be the victimized lady. Sadly, in the case of the Harts, I was doing just that: trying to identify Jennifer as the evil mastermind dragging poor Sarah along!! This pattern of letting “the femme off the hook” connects to my experience of Safiya Sinclair’s How to Say Babylon. In both stories, I think abused mothers—which may include Sarah Hart—are still responsible for how *their* actions harm their children, a fact that often gets lost when we are trying to absolve mothers of guilt for their abuser’s actions.
In addition to showing the modern flaws of the family policing system, Asgarian also touches on many other political topics. She ties this system to its origins in this country’s separation of Indigenous and African families, and criticizes the carceral nature of the residential treatment centers that foster youth like Dontay (Devonte, Jeremiah, and Ciera’s brother) are routinely placed in. One of the most heartbreaking threads in this story was how Dontay was broken down by the family policing system’s intergenerational impacts—in less than two full decades, this system resulted in him being separated from at least three generations of his family (parents, siblings, and then his own son.) In the epilogue, Asgarian even explores how the family policing system’s failures relate to the need to abolish the prison industrial complex.
In closing, I would recommend this book to anyone who wants a condemnation of the family policing system that is anchored in real-life stories, and any queer person trying to think more critically about how their family planning actions can harm other families. I am very thankful to have read We Were Once a Family, but also deeply sad that it only exists because of a tragic annihilation of life, and before that, a tragic theft of familial connection. Roxana Asgarian does an amazing job at placing the Davis and Scheurich families (particularly Tammy, Sherry, Dontay, and Nathaniel) at the center of their children’s stories, and showing the ways our society and systems must change to give children like Markis, Hannah, Abigail, Devonte, Jeremiah, and Ciera a fighting chance to thrive.
Reflection + Application Corner
This section is less directly about the book, and more about one of my goals in 2024, which is to more deeply reflect on the actions I can take in response to the nonfiction/issue-based books I read. So far, this reflection hasn’t been a clear process. Sometimes, like after reading Light in Gaza, the answer seems to be that there is no shortage of actions that I could take, because every facet of American life is tied up in settler colonial occupation. For this book’s reflection corner, I am fortunate to have a role model for showing up for this issue: my girlfriend, Maya. For several years, she’s been a constant source of education about the family policing system, and the organizations who are fighting back against its harm of Black families. Maya is the person who first told me about Dorothy Roberts’ work on the family policing system, particularly her book Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World. This one is high on my TBR list to keep learning about this issue, along with family abolitionists’ takes on the family policing system. I am hoping that the combination of these frameworks can answer a question I still have after reading We Were Once a Family: if there are care networks that get away from either type of family (birth or adoptive) feeling they have the right to own children.
In terms of action beyond reading, the fight against family policing is very strong in our area. Durham County is a particularly notorious site for child removal and family separation, and has severely punished mothers who are attempting to protect themselves and their children from domestic violence, retaliated against parents who are organizing for family preservation, and prevented a young autistic boy from being united with his father, who moved across state lines to take care of him. Again, thanks to Maya’s involvement, I have also learned about Operation Stop CPS, a Durham organization that is fighting to end the terrible situations being created by the family policing system. This organization has experienced significant repression locally, in part due to its success in pressuring the systems that are tearing Black families apart.
In my mind, this organization presents the clearest opportunity for me to support efforts to end this broken system. I have set up a very modest recurring donation to Operation Stop CPS, which I hope to expand in scale once I am able. I’ve also subscribed to their newsletter and social media platforms, so I can better track future actions and calls for support to given families who are fighting to reunite with their children. This is nothing to be proud of, and honestly something I should have done when Maya first told me about the Operation Stop CPS meeting she’d attended. However, it’s something I want to be transparent about, in hopes that it will help me keep moving forward on the right track. If anyone else is led to financially support Operation Stop CPS, you can do so at this link. you can do so at this link.
This was a much needed counternarrative to an important story that has mostly fallen into the hands of true crime enthusiasts. In We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America; author Roxana Asgarian colors in much of the missing pieces of the lives of Markis, Hannah, Abigail, Devonte, Jeremiah, and Ciera; six Black and/or biracial young people who were removed from their biological families and extended communities in various parts of Texas. Unfortunately, most people came to know these teens and pre-teens in 2018, when they were tragically murdered by their adopted parents, Jennifer and Sarah Hart. The unusually disturbing nature of the Hart family murder-suicide has been the subject of true crime podcasts, as well as the inspiration for an episode of the comedy-drama series, Atlanta. I remember watching the first part of the Atlanta episode and immediately being sick to my stomach. (I did not finish the episode, but was later informed that the Atlanta version of the story does not result in family annihilation.) Even with the happier ending, I think the Atlanta episode exemplifies how most coverage of this story has either resulted in mockery, or failed to show adequate support for its true victims: the children and their birth families. In We Were Once a Family, Asgarian makes it her mission to provide less sensationalist coverage of Markis, Hannah, Abigail, Devonte, Jeremiah, and Ciera’s final years; and to provide more compassionate coverage of the Davis and Scheurich families.
Before I get into the review, I want to provide a bit of my own context (and blind spots) with Child Protective Services, foster care, adoption, child abuse, and everything else tied up in the family policing system. I come from an extended family where several adults (including my parents and maternal grandmother) were foster or adoptive parents at some point—this ranges from informal kinship placements to formal placements of non-relatives. Several people in my family also have traumatic histories of child abuse, very few of which have resulted in the involvement of CPS. In the instance I am most familiar with, my sibling and I saw a therapist who reported information we shared with her to CPS, something we never wanted to happen. My understanding is that CPS never investigated the therapist’s report, which probably has a lot to do with my immediate family’s class position. This “best-case scenario” of CPS involvement shows how my family’s darkest experiences have not been exacerbated by the trauma of child removal. As this book will show, this perverse privilege of privacy in your worst moments is not extended to many other Black families.
One of the major points Asgarian tries to make clear in We Were Once a Family is that Markis, Hannah, Abigail, Devonte, Jeremiah, and Ciera were not abused by their parents until they gained adoptive parents. Throughout the book, she showcases how all of the children were deeply loved by their birth parents and non-parental caregivers, all of whom wanted to provide these young people with great upbringings. These families were prevented from doing so due to a series of CPS “violations” and investigations that mostly had to do with claims of neglect. While neglect can be an intentional form of child abuse, in the case of these children, the neglect they experienced (or that CPS claimed they experienced) was mostly due to our society’s exploitation and deprivation of the poor. Many of the “violations” the kids’ parents and caregivers made could have been resolved by providing the adults with access to transportation, quality housing, and support for substance abuse.
Instead of providing any of these resources, the family policing system actively FOUGHT to remove these children from their communities. This is particularly true in the case of Devonte, Jeremiah, and Ciera; who had two relatives (their aunt, Priscilla and their chosen father, Nate) who were ready and able to take care of them. However, Asgarian reveals that the Harris County courts had significant financial incentives to terminate parental rights and sell children to adoptive families. This book’s explanation of the profit motives for the family policing system are infuriating and eye-opening. After learning that the adoption of foster youth is the cheapest option for queer parents *and* the most lucrative option for the state, everything starts to make sense in an awful way: why there aren’t more check-ins on adoptees, why there’s such a push to quickly terminate parental rights, and so on. At every point, the rights and interests of birth families are seen as less important, because their poverty is reframed as proof that they are unfit and undeserving parents, *and* because many powerful people have a financial or familial interest in removing these children. We Were Once a Family explains how this perfect storm of paternalism and profit results in a system that is constantly failing Black children.
This book has a lot to say about the failures of the family policing system, AND the failure of certain queer domestic systems. I am not sure how Asgarian identifies, but as a Black lesbian, this book made me think back to the 2020/21 conversations about how some queer people can leverage their citizenship and class status in ways that further oppression. This conversation particularly centered around the Black lesbian couple who were “expats” in Bali, which coincided with my reading of Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place. Due to this overlap, whenever I encounter queer “paradises” that rely on exploitation, I’m reminded of how Kincaid troubles the concept of paradise. In this case, Jennifer and Sarah Hart created their version of a lesbian domestic paradise thanks to the family policing system, and also their status as white women. Asgarian calls all the way back to the adoption histories of the very white Midwestern communities they grew up in, which were the main beneficiaries of the orphan trains that removed children in industrializing Northeastern cities from their families and sent them to “pioneers” in need of child labor. The book details how Jennifer and Sarah had internalized these sorts of legacies, and truly believed that they were “saving” the children from depraved upbringings in Texas. Asgarian refuses to dramatize the Harts’ vile abuse of Markis, Hannah, Abigail, Devonte, Jeremiah, and Ciera, but she does reveal how many witnesses to this abuse (including Jennifer and Sarah’s friends and various state caseworkers) were blinded by their own racism. These people bought the lesbian domestic paradise act the Harts were selling, seeing Jennifer and Sarah as tree-hugging galpals who were teaching their multicultural family to be vegan and rely on natural medicine. I was shocked by how many people seemed to keep up this narrative of Jennifer and Sarah as sweet, misguided girls even in the face of irrefutable evidence of what they’d done to the actual children!! Unfortunately, as Asgarian reveals, this sickening empathy for the Harts continued even after they murdered their “perfect hippie family”, and it is directly contrasted by the lack of empathy for the mostly non-white birth families.
I even had my own case of what Asgarian calls the “kids-glove treatment” of the Hart women. When reading articles about this case, I was certain that Sarah was being coerced by Jennifer, and was not a willing participant in the abuse of Markis, Hannah, Abigail, Devonte, Jeremiah, and Cierra. After reading this book, I agree with Asgarian’s argument that even if Jennifer was instigating the family dynamic, both women were still facilitators of child abuse. Again, I think the couple being lesbians matters here—I cannot tell you how many times my friends and I have shared our frustration at many straight people’s urges to typecast lesbian relationships, so the assumed “masc” partner becomes the abusive man, while the assumed “femme” partner is made out to be the victimized lady. Sadly, in the case of the Harts, I was doing just that: trying to identify Jennifer as the evil mastermind dragging poor Sarah along!! This pattern of letting “the femme off the hook” connects to my experience of Safiya Sinclair’s How to Say Babylon. In both stories, I think abused mothers—which may include Sarah Hart—are still responsible for how *their* actions harm their children, a fact that often gets lost when we are trying to absolve mothers of guilt for their abuser’s actions.
In addition to showing the modern flaws of the family policing system, Asgarian also touches on many other political topics. She ties this system to its origins in this country’s separation of Indigenous and African families, and criticizes the carceral nature of the residential treatment centers that foster youth like Dontay (Devonte, Jeremiah, and Ciera’s brother) are routinely placed in. One of the most heartbreaking threads in this story was how Dontay was broken down by the family policing system’s intergenerational impacts—in less than two full decades, this system resulted in him being separated from at least three generations of his family (parents, siblings, and then his own son.) In the epilogue, Asgarian even explores how the family policing system’s failures relate to the need to abolish the prison industrial complex.
In closing, I would recommend this book to anyone who wants a condemnation of the family policing system that is anchored in real-life stories, and any queer person trying to think more critically about how their family planning actions can harm other families. I am very thankful to have read We Were Once a Family, but also deeply sad that it only exists because of a tragic annihilation of life, and before that, a tragic theft of familial connection. Roxana Asgarian does an amazing job at placing the Davis and Scheurich families (particularly Tammy, Sherry, Dontay, and Nathaniel) at the center of their children’s stories, and showing the ways our society and systems must change to give children like Markis, Hannah, Abigail, Devonte, Jeremiah, and Ciera a fighting chance to thrive.
Reflection + Application Corner
This section is less directly about the book, and more about one of my goals in 2024, which is to more deeply reflect on the actions I can take in response to the nonfiction/issue-based books I read. So far, this reflection hasn’t been a clear process. Sometimes, like after reading Light in Gaza, the answer seems to be that there is no shortage of actions that I could take, because every facet of American life is tied up in settler colonial occupation. For this book’s reflection corner, I am fortunate to have a role model for showing up for this issue: my girlfriend, Maya. For several years, she’s been a constant source of education about the family policing system, and the organizations who are fighting back against its harm of Black families. Maya is the person who first told me about Dorothy Roberts’ work on the family policing system, particularly her book Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World. This one is high on my TBR list to keep learning about this issue, along with family abolitionists’ takes on the family policing system. I am hoping that the combination of these frameworks can answer a question I still have after reading We Were Once a Family: if there are care networks that get away from either type of family (birth or adoptive) feeling they have the right to own children.
In terms of action beyond reading, the fight against family policing is very strong in our area. Durham County is a particularly notorious site for child removal and family separation, and has severely punished mothers who are attempting to protect themselves and their children from domestic violence, retaliated against parents who are organizing for family preservation, and prevented a young autistic boy from being united with his father, who moved across state lines to take care of him. Again, thanks to Maya’s involvement, I have also learned about Operation Stop CPS, a Durham organization that is fighting to end the terrible situations being created by the family policing system. This organization has experienced significant repression locally, in part due to its success in pressuring the systems that are tearing Black families apart.
In my mind, this organization presents the clearest opportunity for me to support efforts to end this broken system. I have set up a very modest recurring donation to Operation Stop CPS, which I hope to expand in scale once I am able. I’ve also subscribed to their newsletter and social media platforms, so I can better track future actions and calls for support to given families who are fighting to reunite with their children. This is nothing to be proud of, and honestly something I should have done when Maya first told me about the Operation Stop CPS meeting she’d attended. However, it’s something I want to be transparent about, in hopes that it will help me keep moving forward on the right track. If anyone else is led to financially support Operation Stop CPS, you can do so at this link. you can do so at this link.
August 1, 2023
This was a fascinating book that kept my attention the whole way. But if you’re looking for a fair/un-biased examination of what happened to the 6 children adopted out of the child welfare system and eventually killed by their adoptive parents you won’t get it here. This is one sided and extremely sympathetic to the birth parents whose behavior was beyond the pale in some instances. I wanted more information, more examination of the systems and the communities and the society that contributed to this (child welfare doesn't operate in a vacuum, birth families don't either), and less putting some suuuuuuuper dysfunctional people on a pedestal. For a much more balanced look at both sides of a child welfare case check out The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures
September 30, 2022
This is an excellent book! Told with compassion and truth. The author tells all sides of a horrible murder/suicide. It is an indictment of the foster care system and those who make decisions about who is and who is not fit to keep their children. My overwhelming feeling after reading this is deep and profound sadness. I do not know any answers but I know that it's the children that suffer and continue to suffer. Well written and important.
August 31, 2025
3.5 Stars
An important read. Asgarian primarily focuses on the tragic story of six adopted children who were killed in a murder/suicide when their parents intentionally drove off the road in 2018, but she also zooms out to take a look at the broken foster care and child protection services systems in America. Truly heartbreaking.
An important read. Asgarian primarily focuses on the tragic story of six adopted children who were killed in a murder/suicide when their parents intentionally drove off the road in 2018, but she also zooms out to take a look at the broken foster care and child protection services systems in America. Truly heartbreaking.
March 5, 2023
When the story of the Hart family’s murder-suicide broke, I knew this book would come, but I have been holding my breath for a long time about what kind of book it would be.
As a former foster parent who became interested in learning everything possible about the winding ins and outs of the system historically thru today, I’ve read my fair share of overviews. Many fall into the trap of considering what is best for children based on length of time in care alone, and the problem of impermanence. This book is not that — and thank goodness.
This book takes the tragedy of the Hart family and does not scour Jen & Sarah’s psyche past the obvious nor does it cast them thru the sympathetic lens as overwhelmed women and mothers doing the best they could til they reached a breaking point as so many stories do (even the final verdict of the coroner’s inquest handled them with kid-gloves, refusing to call it murder but rather death of children by the hands of another — as though the overdose levels of Benadryl and driving them over a cliff were not clearly intentional, to say nothing of the logistics of the car having clearly accelerated, and Sarah’s final google searches retrieved from her phone asking how much it would take to overdose them & die by drowning and hypothermia). It is outrageous the level of giving the benefit of the doubt Jen and Sarah enjoyed in life and then in Murder-Suicide, while the children’s birth families received no such benefit and often were cruelly denied it (the children’s aunt in particular is a cruel tragedy; just one example — her appeal to adopt the children was denied based on the fact the children were in her care 5 1/2 months instead of the required six. Yet Jen and Sarah’s adoption was finalized in breakneck speed, before the appeal had even gone through the court).
This book unwinds the much more complex story of how the Hart children came to be adopted by the mothers in the first place, and how the system fails birth families and, by default, those children. It also importantly follows the living sibling whose story showcases the generational trauma of foster care. It should break your heart and then infuriate you.
This is a great modern case study in injustice, racism rampant in the child welfare political game, and the impact of poverty and generational trauma. It is a modern version of the classic LOST CHILDREN OF WILDER by Nina Bernstein, and a readable entry into understanding what’s wrong with foster care. This book handles tragedy without lurid details or assuming birth families must have been the worse option as so many hit pieces do. I am grateful it exists so I can recommend it to any wishing to look beyond the savior narrative of adoption and foster parenting.
Well-researched, searing and compassionate to the right people. Highly recommend.
Thank you to NetGalley for my copy.
As a former foster parent who became interested in learning everything possible about the winding ins and outs of the system historically thru today, I’ve read my fair share of overviews. Many fall into the trap of considering what is best for children based on length of time in care alone, and the problem of impermanence. This book is not that — and thank goodness.
This book takes the tragedy of the Hart family and does not scour Jen & Sarah’s psyche past the obvious nor does it cast them thru the sympathetic lens as overwhelmed women and mothers doing the best they could til they reached a breaking point as so many stories do (even the final verdict of the coroner’s inquest handled them with kid-gloves, refusing to call it murder but rather death of children by the hands of another — as though the overdose levels of Benadryl and driving them over a cliff were not clearly intentional, to say nothing of the logistics of the car having clearly accelerated, and Sarah’s final google searches retrieved from her phone asking how much it would take to overdose them & die by drowning and hypothermia). It is outrageous the level of giving the benefit of the doubt Jen and Sarah enjoyed in life and then in Murder-Suicide, while the children’s birth families received no such benefit and often were cruelly denied it (the children’s aunt in particular is a cruel tragedy; just one example — her appeal to adopt the children was denied based on the fact the children were in her care 5 1/2 months instead of the required six. Yet Jen and Sarah’s adoption was finalized in breakneck speed, before the appeal had even gone through the court).
This book unwinds the much more complex story of how the Hart children came to be adopted by the mothers in the first place, and how the system fails birth families and, by default, those children. It also importantly follows the living sibling whose story showcases the generational trauma of foster care. It should break your heart and then infuriate you.
This is a great modern case study in injustice, racism rampant in the child welfare political game, and the impact of poverty and generational trauma. It is a modern version of the classic LOST CHILDREN OF WILDER by Nina Bernstein, and a readable entry into understanding what’s wrong with foster care. This book handles tragedy without lurid details or assuming birth families must have been the worse option as so many hit pieces do. I am grateful it exists so I can recommend it to any wishing to look beyond the savior narrative of adoption and foster parenting.
Well-researched, searing and compassionate to the right people. Highly recommend.
Thank you to NetGalley for my copy.
May 10, 2023
This journalistic nonfiction read will leave you equal parts angry and devastated at how we are failing foster children in our so-called “family court system.”
My husband aged out of the foster system in the south side of Chicago, so this topic hits directly at home.
There is so much to comment on, but one of the main points that was mentioned many times, was how CPS often punished parents who were struggling with POVERTY.
Yes, poverty. Not abuse, not neglect, but simply had limited resources and it made it hard to take care of children, but never because of a lack of love.
There is no easy solution to this monster of a problem that has ruined millions of lives of children…but the first step can be to read or listen to this book.
My husband aged out of the foster system in the south side of Chicago, so this topic hits directly at home.
There is so much to comment on, but one of the main points that was mentioned many times, was how CPS often punished parents who were struggling with POVERTY.
Yes, poverty. Not abuse, not neglect, but simply had limited resources and it made it hard to take care of children, but never because of a lack of love.
There is no easy solution to this monster of a problem that has ruined millions of lives of children…but the first step can be to read or listen to this book.
May 6, 2023
What an indictment of the foster care to adoption pipeline in this country especially within poor Black communities! The author is thorough and balanced in her presentation of her research. Be prepared to experience some very strong emotions. It’s far past time we stopped criminalizing poverty in this country.
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