Book Description

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 multiple children at the bottom of a cliff along 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 six Black children from two different Texas families in 2006 and 2008. Behind the family’s loving facade was an alleged pattern of abuse and neglect that had been ignored as the couple withdrew the children from school and moved west. It soon became apparent that the State of Texas knew all too little about the two individuals to whom it had given custody of six children.

Immersive journalism of the highest order, Roxanna Asgarian’s We Were Once a Family is a revelation of precarious lives; it is also a shattering exposé of the foster care and adoption systems that produced this tragedy. As a journalist in Houston, Asgarian sought out the children’s birth families and put them at the center of the story. We follow the lives of the Harts’ adopted children and their birth parents, and the machinations of the state agency that sent the children far away. Asgarian’s reporting uncovers persistent racial biases and corruption as young people 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.

(2023, hardcover, 320 pages)

Staff Member Review

This is a difficult–but valuable–book. It is a story of trauma and heartbreak and abuse. It is a story of missed opportunities and mismanaged responsibilities that had long-reaching and fatal consequences.

Jennifer and Sarah Hart were a white LGBTQ couple who adopted two groups of African-American or mixed-race siblings from Texas. Each adoption was a group of three children. Red flags followed the family from Minnesota to Oregon and finally to the site of their deaths in California. Unfortunately, none of the workers, agencies, or entities involved were able to connect the warning signs from different agencies in different states in order to save the lives of all eight family members.

Roxanna Asgarian’s reporting is thorough and impressive. There are numerous news stories online detailing the tragedy, but what Asgarian does in WE WERE ONCE A FAMILY, is give a voice to the individuals so often left out of the narrative in foster care and adoption: that of the mothers who birthed children they love, the family members who stepped up and tried to step in, of siblings who also spent time in foster care and juvenile justice facilities.

We can’t know the full story behind the murder of six children and the suicides of two adults. We can only look back on the pieces left behind and wonder why or what if. Answers to either question are moot points, of course, but they might also be opportunities to spark much-needed action and meaningful change.

Author: Roxanna Asgarian
ISBN: 978-0-374-60229-1
Count: 1