Family That Mom Drove Off Cliff in California
Earlier Harts Plunged Off a Cliff, Strain Indomitable Family
At 3:38 p.1000. on Monday, March 26, 2018, a German language tourist called the authorities from the Juan Creek crossing on California's scenic Highway 1. She had spotted something jarring: a brownish sport-utility vehicle, upside down, in the Pacific Sea.
When Highway Patrol officers arrived, they found the S.U.V. Jennifer Hart was at the wheel, and her wife, Sarah Hart, was trapped between the roof and the seats in the back. Both were dead.
Within most three weeks, the authorities would also observe the remains of four of the Harts' six children — Markis, 19, Jeremiah, xiv, Abigail, 14, and Ciera, 12 — and declare them all expressionless, too. They eventually discovered skeletal remains inside a woman's shoe, and appear this month that they belonged to sixteen-year-onetime Hannah. Devonte, 15, is still considered to be missing, but is presumed dead.
Jennifer, 38, had been drunk at the time of the crash, and Sarah, 38, and two of their children had in their systems a significant corporeality of an antihistamine that tin can cause drowsiness, law enforcement officials said.
Though the central question of why Jennifer Hart drove off the cliff may never be resolved, interviews and more than ane,000 pages of investigative documents released past the authorities in Washington Land — where the family last lived — reveal the most vivid picture yet of the Hart family.
They portray Jennifer and Sarah equally adoptive mothers under increasing strain, who fled at signs of trouble and airtight ranks around their children equally scrutiny intensified.
And they show that by that fateful Monday terminal March, as kid welfare officials came knocking, some neighbors, relatives and co-workers were growing alarmed.
"Are yous ok?!" ane of Sarah's co-workers texted her two minutes later on the High german tourist reported the S.U.V. "Please let someone know...we are all freaking out hither."
[Read our initial coverage of the crash ]
Police enforcement officials in California take issued only 1 argument on the case since May, though the investigation continues. Relatives and friends of Jennifer and Sarah declined to comment for this commodity. Still, the documents illuminate the complicated family dynamics amid the Harts — a white couple who adopted 6 blackness children, all of whom would perish.
A family grows
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Jennifer Jean Hart and Sarah Margaret Gengler grew upward about 150 miles autonomously in S Dakota and met at Northern State University. By 2005, they were living together in Alexandria, Minn.
Investigative documents say they provided foster care for a 16-year-old daughter who was removed from their dwelling in February 2006 because of her "suicidal idealizations and threats." The couple were planning to adopt and said they "didn't want that negative energy to bear upon their children," the documents said.
Markis, Hannah and Abigail were placed with the Harts on March 4, 2006, and their adoption was completed vi months later. Within a yr, the women spent at to the lowest degree 15 hours training on topics like "racial diversity excitement" and "helping abused kids in intendance heal," documents show.
"The Hart family takes every opportunity to gloat the children's indigenous heritage," a caseworker wrote in a report for the Permanent Family Resource Center, a foster care and adoption agency in Fergus Falls, Minn., that afterwards closed after being cited for code violations. The caseworker "whole heartily" recommended that the family be able to prefer a second sibling group.
Jeremiah, Devonte and Ciera were adopted in June 2008, documents testify; Jennifer and Sarah married in Connecticut the next year.
In a March 2009 email, Jennifer shared plans for the family unit'due south next step: Sarah is "trying to get pregnant," she wrote.
"Afterwards 10 years of talking nigh this, nosotros have decided on a donor," Jennifer wrote. "This month will be the start time she will have done the actual procedure. It's kind of nervewracking."
But by July, she wrote to someone else, the doctor "couldn't find the babe's heart beat."
She updated the person vi days afterward: "The baby did not brand it."
Signs of problem
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In an August 2010 email to another woman, Jennifer complained about Sarah, who she said had "said some hurtful things."
"For quite some time I have felt very nether appreciated, and taken for granted in our relationship...and at times unloved," she wrote. "While I know deep in my heart how much she loves me...she is but horrible most showing information technology."
"I have felt that I accept been raising the kids on my own," she added. "I need a 'break.'"
A few months subsequently, Minnesota Child Welfare received half-dozen reports of corruption or fail past the Harts — two of which it deemed credible. In one episode, Sarah admitted to having physically harmed Abigail. Records show Sarah was convicted of misdemeanor domestic assault.
The family then made its first major move — to Due west Linn, Ore. — where an anonymous person told officials that the Hart children appeared malnourished. Investigators in Oregon began an inquiry and interviewed women who knew the family unit and described them as militant parents who imposed harsh disciplinary measures on their children.
[Read more about the reports made to child welfare officials' and their attempts to arbitrate.]
Merely any private turmoil was glossed over by public videos and posts on social media that portrayed a happy, if eccentric, family unit. YouTube videos posted by Jennifer, for example, show Devonte dancing and the other children singing, "We are so provided for."
Only at a 2014 demonstration in Portland, Ore., to protestation constabulary violence, Devonte was photographed with a pained expression hugging a white constabulary sergeant. The image went viral, and it was time to move again.
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Meeting the neighbors
Past May 2017 the Harts were living on more than ii acres of land in Woodland, Wash. The just two other homes nearby were shrouded by trees and fences.
Bruce and Dana DeKalb lived in i of them. They told investigators that they had been excited to have new neighbors. Simply they so rarely saw anyone from the property that they initially wondered if a family had in fact moved in.
They had. Effectually 1:30 a.yard. one twenty-four hour period in August 2017, Hannah rang the DeKalbs' doorbell and ran inside their abode, the DeKalbs said in interviews. She was missing ii teeth and was and then sparse that they thought the teenager was half-dozen or 7 years old.
"Can you take me to Seattle?" Mr. DeKalb, 63, recalled her asking.
Hannah said she had jumped out of a second-story window to escape. She explained that she had been whipped and that her mothers were racist, Mr. DeKalb said.
Minutes later, Hannah's parents showed upwardly at the DeKalbs' habitation, and Hannah hid in a sleeping room.
Eventually, Ms. DeKalb gave Jennifer time to speak with her daughter alone. After they came downstairs, Hannah apologized, and they went dwelling house, Ms. DeKalb said.
Hannah and her family returned the side by side morning with a written apology. Jennifer explained that Hannah was bipolar and struggling with the expiry of their true cat. Otherwise, Jennifer insisted, the children loved their new domicile just as they loved spontaneous adventures. The children nodded.
"She was then convincing," Ms. DeKalb, 59, said of Jennifer.
Even so, Ms. DeKalb was worried. In the months that followed, none of the Hart children would speak with her when she tried to talk with them.
Then, in March 2018, Devonte began going to the DeKalb residence requesting food.
Devonte told the DeKalbs his parents were withholding nutrient as penalty, but would ask them not to tell his "mom" that he was visiting, Ms. DeKalb said. When she asked which female parent, he explained that there was "Mom and Sarah" — and that "Mom" was responsible for the corruption. Sarah "didn't used to become forth with it," Devonte told Ms. DeKalb, simply was now "tolerating" Jennifer'south behavior.
"I absolutely, from the lesser of my center, trust what he said," Ms. DeKalb added.
Devonte also asked that the DeKalbs not call the police considering he feared the family unit would get split upward. Only later in March, Ms. DeKalb told him she was going to. The next night, when Devonte visited, she said he asked, "Accept you chosen yet?"
Ms. DeKalb contacted the state's child welfare bureau the next morn, Friday, March 23, 2018.
She would later grapple with a dark thought: "Because I reported, they took off and killed these kids."
Concerned co-workers
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There was nothing unusual about Sarah's behavior that Friday, ane of her co-workers at Kohl'southward told investigators. Merely several colleagues would later recall that she had previously made odd complaints near her children and became visibly distraught when taking calls from her wife.
Sarah told them that her children "could not function on their ain," had "food bug" and were not allowed in the kitchen.
An banana manager also said Sarah "would be very concerned" if Jennifer texted or chosen her at piece of work, sometimes exiting the room in a panic and fierce upward during heated telephone calls.
Sarah told that managing director that Jennifer struggled with depression and mentioned to another co-worker that Jennifer "would stay in bed and cry all the time." A close relative of Jennifer's was said to have "concerns near Jennifer's state of heed," documents show.
The assistant manager told the government near a conversation with Sarah that stood out: Sarah once said she wished that someone had "told her information technology was O.K. not to accept a big family."
"Then," Sarah told her dominate, "she and Jennifer would not have adopted the children."
Even with so much going on at home, a manager told investigators, Sarah had "never failed to show up for work."
Video reviewed past investigators showed Sarah Hart leaving Kohl'due south around 5:26 p.m. on March 23 in a white Pontiac. A kid welfare official responding to Ms. DeKalb'south call that morning arrived at the Hart abode about 10 minutes before that and saw a gold S.U.V. come up the driveway and pull up to the Hart home, according to a written report. And so the caseworker knocked on the front door. No respond. She left her business carte.
But before 3 a.m. the next mean solar day, records show, Sarah Hart texted at least three co-workers: "I idea I would be able to go to work just I'm too sick to come up in."
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The authorities later reviewed video of what appears to be Jennifer at a Safeway on the forenoon of Sunday, March 25. The supermarket was near 25 miles from the Juan Creek crossing on Highway 1.
Investigators returned to the Harts' home in Washington State the next day. The aureate South.U.V. was gone; a German tourist would spot it a few hours later, upside downwards on a rocky shoreline, more than 500 miles down the Pacific Coast.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/us/family-drives-off-cliff-jennifer-sarah-hart.html
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