Page 62 - Marie Claire Australia (January 2020)

CRIME
California’s Highway 1,
where the wreckage of the
family was found on March
26, 2018. BELOW Jen caught
on surveillance camera
buying groceries the day
before the fatal crash.
– March 23, 26 and 27 – and were
unable to reach them.) Less than an
hour later, Dana saw Sarah’s car tear
up the driveway to the house. The
next day Jen’s SUV was gone, and
cinder blocks from a retaining wall
were scattered about the driveway,
hinting at a hasty departure.
On Sunday morning a surveillance
camera in a Fort Bragg Safeway
captured Jen, in glasses and a hoodie,
buying groceries. She was alone and
around 10kg heavier than friends had
ever seen her. On Monday afternoon a
Kohl’s co-worker called emergency and
requested a welfare check on Sarah,
who had uncharacteristically missed
work all weekend and hadn’t responded
to texts. About two hours later, a
German tourist reported their car,
just 25 minutes away from the Safeway.
The bodies of Markis, Abigail and
Jeremiah were found a few hundred
metres from the wreckage. Two weeks
later Sierra’s body washed ashore, and
a foot belonging to Hannah was found
later that spring. No trace of Devonte
has ever been found.
As damning headlines dribbled
out, some who knew the Harts
scrambled to social media to defend
them. Musician Nahko Bear, one of
Jen’s favourite performers, tweeted,
“Devonte had a history of [an] eating
disorder. It was not unusual that he
was always hungry or not hungry at
all.” Zippy Lomax, a festival friend,
was quoted in a local paper saying,
“Jen and Sarah were the kind of
parents this world desperately needs.”
But the public wasn’t buying it.
62 | marieclaire.com.au
“It seems likely that
the mums’ whiteness
netted them multiple
passes despite all
the warning signs”
– Professor Stacey Patton
Armchair sleuths convened in
private Facebook forums to pore
over each detail of the case. Jen was a
“narcissist”, Sarah an “enabler”. One
observer pointed out that in a snap of
kids posing in front of their artwork,
there was no paint on their brushes.
Adding outrage was the fact the
kids had been removed from their black
families and placed with white parents
who were deemed more fit. “For
the Harts, it seems likely that their
whiteness netted them multiple passes
despite all the warning signs,” wrote
Morgan State University professor
Stacey Patton in The Washington Post.
Shonda Jones, the Houston attorney
who represented Sierra, Devonte and
Jeremiah’s aunt in her custody battle,
says she’s still haunted by how her
client was treated 10 years ago. “I
don’t believe that Ms Celestine had
ever had as much as a traffic ticket.
She went to work, home and church,”
she says. “The court seemed to have
had a complete disregard for her.”
Today, many questions still haunt
Dana. Should she have called CPS
sooner? Was it that very phone call
that set into motion the events that
ended with a car over a cliff?
As for the hardest question – why?
– we may never have a satisfying
answer. Maybe Jen, tasked with
looking after six kids, became
overwhelmed. One co-worker at
Kohl’s told investigators that Sarah
constantly took calls from her wife,
who said the kids were “making her
crazy”. Sarah had told colleagues that
Jen struggled with depression and
anxiety, and often stayed in bed to cry.
Maybe the women envisioned the
perfect blended family for themselves,
and even tried to manifest it with their
photos and stories, but had no idea
what day-to-day life would be like.
Once, Sarah told a co-worker she
wished someone had told her it was
OK not to have a big family, because
she never would have adopted children
at all. Or maybe they baulked at the
forthcoming financial strain: in
the past decade the Harts had collected
almost $400,000 from the state of
Texas to help care for the children,
but as the kids grew up they’d no longer
be eligible for subsidies. Sarah’s 2017
income statement showed she had
earned just over $65,000 that year.
Or maybe Jen and Sarah really
believed they were heroes, martyrs
who couldn’t overcome the tyranny
of racism, childhood trauma,
prejudice and six kids who kept
running to the neighbours. Hannah
and Devonte had already spoken up.
Now CPS was on the case in a third
state. So they did what they’d done
before: they ran. And maybe, when
they got to California, the ledge no
longer looked like a photo op. Maybe it
looked like the only way out. Maybe.
Here’s what we do know: the system
failed these kids. “When I bring up this
case in the professional community,
there is a heaviness,” says April
Dinwoodie, former CEO of the New
York City–based Donaldson Adoption
Institute. “We all feel guilty, because
it’s the professionals’ fault.” And
perhaps more chilling, the smoke
and mirrors of a compelling digital
narrative clouded our sense of civic
responsibility. Markis, Hannah,
Devonte, Abigail, Jeremiah and Sierra
died because everyone saw something
different when they looked at them:
the “perfect” family; some lucky,
rescued kids; a symbol for post-racial
kumbaya. Few saw six young people
in desperate need of help. No-one
saw that there was no paint on the
paintbrushes until it was too late. PHOTOGRAPHY BY AUSTRALSCOPE; AAP; JENNIFER HART FACEBOOK.
Jen Hart’s final Facebook
post, a video of a pair of ducklings,
continues to live at the top of her
Facebook feed, the final entry in
a story she no longer controls. “So
much joy in new life” it reads.
Like most of Jen’s posts, it has
more than 100 likes.