Reader discretion: this story contains details of violence some readers may find distressing.
On Friday, March 23, 2018, a caseworker from Washington’s child protective services drove out to a house on two acres near Woodland, a small town north of Portland.
Six children lived there with their two mothers. A neighbor had called the state. She said one of the boys kept coming to her door asking for food.
The caseworker knocked. Nobody answered.
At about 8:30 that night, the family’s GPS shows, a brown 2003 GMC Yukon XL pulled out of the driveway with all eight of them inside. None of them would ever come back.
The family from the photos
Jennifer and Sarah Hart grew up in South Dakota and met as students at Northern State University. They moved to Alexandria, Minnesota, and in 2006 they took in three siblings from Texas: Markis, Hannah and Abigail. Two years later they adopted three more brothers and sisters from Houston: Devonte, Jeremiah and Ciera.
Jennifer stayed home with the children. Online, she built a picture of a family that seemed almost too good to be true: six kids in matching T-shirts at music festivals, camping trips, road trips down the West Coast, protests and peace rallies.
Friends who saw the family up close told a different story later. In Minnesota, one of the girls came to school with bruises. Sarah Hart pleaded guilty to misdemeanor domestic assault over a beating. Soon after, the children were taken out of school and taught at home, where no teacher could see them.
The family moved to West Linn, Oregon. In 2013, Oregon child welfare officials looked into concerns about the children. They closed the case without taking action.
The hug
On November 25, 2014, protesters marched through downtown Portland after the grand jury decision in Ferguson, Missouri.
Devonte Hart, 12, stood in the crowd holding a hand-lettered sign: “Free Hugs!! Pass it on.” He was crying.
A police sergeant named Bret Barnum saw him. “First thing I said was, ‘Why are you crying,'” Barnum later recalled. Devonte told him he was sad about the protests and about what was going on in the world. As they finished talking, the sergeant pointed at the sign and asked, “Do I get one of those?”
A freelance photographer named Johnny Nguyen took the picture. A small boy in a hat and a leather jacket, tears running down his face, holding on to a police officer in a helmet and uniform.
Within days it had gone around the world. Devonte became the face of a family that looked, to strangers, like proof that love could fix anything.
The house near Woodland
In May 2017, the Harts moved again, to a house on two acres outside Woodland, Washington. Next door lived Bruce and Dana DeKalb.
Within a few months the DeKalbs were worried.
One night in the summer of 2017, their doorbell rang at about 1:30 in the morning. Hannah Hart stood there in a blanket. She had jumped out of a second-story window and run through the woods to their house. Bruce DeKalb said she was begging them to protect her. The mothers came and took her home.
Then, in the week before March 23, 2018, Devonte started coming to the DeKalbs’ door. He came almost every day for a week. He was hungry. He told Dana DeKalb that his mothers were punishing the children by withholding food. He asked her to leave food for him in a box by the fence, and not to tell Jennifer.
The DeKalbs called the state. On Friday, March 23, Washington child protective services opened an investigation and went to the door.
Nobody answered. That night, the family was gone.
The drive south
Investigators would later rebuild the next three days from the family’s GPS records, store cameras and phones.
Eighteen minutes after leaving, the Yukon stopped at a Walmart. Investigators later found generic, Walmart-brand Benadryl in the car.
The family spent nearly two hours by the mouth of the Columbia River. They drove down the Oregon coast, stopping in Tillamook and at a Fred Meyer store in Newport, where a security camera caught Jennifer hurrying inside. They made stops at beaches and gas stations in California. At 7:15 p.m. on Sunday evening, near Fort Bragg, the GPS went dark.
A couple were camping that night at a turnout above the ocean on Highway 1, near Juan Creek, north of the tiny town of Westport in Mendocino County. Around 11 p.m., they heard a vehicle pull in.
Hours later, they heard an engine rev and tires tear through the gravel. One of them thought he heard someone calling for help. He decided it was an animal.
At the bottom of the cliff
On March 26, the brown Yukon was found upside down on the rocks at the foot of the cliff, more than 100 feet below the turnout, at the edge of the Pacific.
Jennifer and Sarah Hart were found in the vehicle. Markis, 19, Jeremiah, 14, and Abigail, 14, were found nearby. Hannah, Devonte and Ciera were missing.
For a few days the story was a tragic accident on a dangerous coastal road. Then the California Highway Patrol said the SUV had stopped at the gravel turnout and then accelerated over the edge, and that the plunge may have been intentional.
The DeKalbs told reporters about the boy who had begged for food. The world realized the boy who had been missing since the crash was the boy from the hug.
And investigators started going through what the family had left behind: the car’s data recorder, the blood tests and the mothers’ phones.
What they found on Sarah Hart’s phone turned a tragedy into something else.
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