Prologue

MENDOCINO COUNTY, CALIFORNIA, MARCH 2018

People come to this place for its sweeping views. Alongside the Pacific Coast Highway, the circular gravel turnoff sits just across from a small bridge over the tiny Juan Creek, and from its edge you can see the rocky Northern California coastline, its cliffs dotted with native grasses and wild succulents. At low tide, you can see the beach where fishermen used to camp, casting their wide nets to catch the night fish that fling themselves onto the waves during spawning season.

A man and his wife were traveling that spring, starting from Alaska and heading down the Pacific Coast Highway, when they parked their RV for the night at that scenic point. It was a spot, halfway between the Oregon border and San Francisco, that showcased the beauty of Northern California, where they could sleep to the sound of the waves crashing below. At about eleven that night, the man heard the sound of a vehicle crunching on the gravel nearby. Being older, the man was careful about where he and his wife bedded down, and he poked his head out to make sure the area was still safe. He saw a big vehicle—not a pickup, but not a sedan either—parked near their RV. Nobody was outside the car. Seems fine, he thought, turning in for the night with his wife.

At around three in the morning, he awoke to the sound of tires screeching on gravel, and what sounded like a car bottoming out. He got himself out of bed and left his camper. It was pitch black, and the sound of the waves was steady. No car was in sight. He thought maybe the vehicle that had joined them earlier had peeled out and headed down into town.

He walked to the edge of the cliff. The ocean was a felt presence more than anything; darkness engulfed him. He thought he heard a wail coming from down below. Was it somebody crying for help? He strained his ears, squinting down into the inky blackness. It must have been a seal, he thought. He turned back to his camper and rejoined his wife in bed.

The next day, after the couple continued on down the coast, a German tourist stood at the edge of the cliff, looking out at the crashing waves. It was Monday, March 26, 2018, and the sky was clear blue, but something alarming marred her view: at the bottom of the steep and jagged cliff lay an SUV flipped on its roof, crumpled, with the vehicle’s undercarriage exposed.

It was about four-thirty in the afternoon on Deputy Robert Julian’s day off when he heard the call about a vehicle in the water. Most of his colleagues were tied up, he knew, two hours down the PCH in Gualala, where a violent altercation between neighbors involving a gun and a shovel left two men in their sixties hospitalized. Julian wasn’t doing anything, so he told dispatch he would go.

Dispatch initially told him there was a two-person fatality, and the deputy, who performed coroner duties for the sheriff’s office, kept a couple of body bags in his car. But as he was heading out toward the point at Juan Creek where the SUV was found, dispatch told him to be prepared for three more bodies. He stopped by the office and grabbed several more body bags.

By the time he arrived on the scene, it was nearly six o’clock, and emergency vehicles were swarming the turnoff point. A helicopter had just arrived, and firefighters were running from their vehicles to the edge of the cliff. The Westport fire chief filled Julian in: Two people were inside the vehicle, deceased, and three more, apparently children, had been flung from the SUV and were found on the shore. All of them were cold, with rigor mortis. Investigators had found water in the tire well; the usually chilly Pacific Coast ocean water had sat inside long enough to turn warm, indicating the vehicle had been there awhile.

There was a problem, the fire chief told him. The overturned SUV was at the bottom of a steep one-hundred-foot cliff; it would be a major feat to retrieve the vehicle and the bodies inside—it was already clear that the bodies in the driver and front passenger seats couldn’t be extricated from the car in its current position. The tow truck that had arrived was not big enough for the job, so they’d sent for a full-size semitruck tower, which was on its way.

In the meantime, Julian grabbed three of the body bags from his trunk and the firefighters descended the cliff to ensconce the three bodies that had been ejected from the car and were on the beach below. The California Highway Patrol helicopter then lifted those bodies to the lookout point, where Julian confirmed they were dead. He found no IDs on the bodies, which he noted were indeed all children.

It was dark by that time, and Julian moved his squad car farther south to another turnoff and directed his brights toward the cliff, to help light the scene below. The industrial tow truck arrived at nearly ten o’clock, and firefighters rappelled down the cliff to attempt to chain the vehicle to the truck. As the SUV—a Yukon—began to lift, a body fell from the driver’s seat, smashing against the rocks amid the surf.

The Yukon was lifted to the cliff’s edge, and Julian confirmed that the person in the front passenger seat, a blond woman, was deceased. A driver’s license found in a tide pool helped him identify her: Sarah Hart. Firefighters retrieved the driver’s body from the rocks, putting it in a large lift bucket and using a winch to get it to the cliff. Jennifer Hart’s temporary ID was in the glove box of the Yukon, but Julian was unable to identify her—the fall out of the SUV as it was being towed up the cliff had smashed her face so that it was unrecognizable.

As Julian worked on identifying and tagging the bodies, California Highway Patrol officer Michael Covington and his partner were busy taking down statements from personnel at the scene for the crash report. Over the course of their careers, the officers had responded to dozens of accidents along the Pacific Coast Highway, including vehicles that had crashed down the cliffs, but they noticed something unusual about this one. The turnout had a wide berm, about eighteen inches of raised land along the edge, covered with grass. There were no skid marks anywhere. “It was definitely out of the ordinary,” Covington said later, adding that it was “very unusual to have no evidence of any kind to indicate why it went down the cliff.”

* * *

Back at the office, deputies researched the license plate number to figure out where the deceased came from. They learned that the Harts were a family of eight from Washington—so there were presumably three children still to be found.

The Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office search and rescue team hit the beach first thing in the morning. As a volunteer operation, they were able to rustle up eight searchers that Tuesday, but the search was grueling and not very fruitful. A storm had come through just before the crash, and the waves were still choppy. Much of the coastline was inaccessible for all but the most expert searchers, who could rappel down. Jared Chaney, the search team coordinator, said that the shifting tides made for “a whole new beach” every six hours. “You’d search at low tide, you’d find something,” he explained. “You’d search at the next high tide, you’d find brand-new things that weren’t there when you were there on that very beach the day before.”

Drones were dispatched to take detailed videos of the hard-to-reach areas, and each day the number of volunteers crept up. Most were dispatched to the bluffs, asking landowners to allow them access to their properties so that they could use high-powered scopes to search along the coastline. When members of the U.S. Coast Guard assessed the probable locations of the bodies, given the tide pattern and the length of time they’d likely been in the water, they identified a forty-five-mile stretch of coast south of the crash site, from Fort Bragg down to Point Arena. Needing help, the search team put out a call to the surrounding counties.

By the time they’d assembled eighty-five searchers, it was nearing the weekend, and they hadn’t yet found any bodies. It wasn’t until April 7, nearly two weeks after the crash, that the body of a girl was found on the shore, a mile north of where the SUV had hit the rocks—in the opposite direction of the zone the Coast Guard had predicted. Investigators began working on identification; ten days later, they announced that the body was that of Ciera Hart, age twelve. The three children they’d found on the beach at the time of the crash were Markis Hart, nineteen; Jeremiah Hart, fourteen; and Abigail Hart, also fourteen.

The day after the crash, Mendocino County sheriff Tom Allman had acknowledged at a press conference that there were no skid or brake marks at the spot where the SUV left the cliff, but he hesitated to speculate about the cause. “We have no evidence and no reason to believe this was an intentional act,” he told reporters.

Those reporters, and many others around the country, rushed to fill in the details of the family’s lives and searched for clues as to what had actually happened. Originally from South Dakota, Jennifer and Sarah, who had been together since college, had adopted one set of three biracial siblings from foster care in Texas in 2006, and a second set of three Black siblings, again from the Texas foster care system, in 2008. They lived with the children first in Alexandria, Minnesota, before moving to West Linn, Oregon (a suburb of Portland), and then to Woodland, Washington, thirty minutes north of Portland.

A breaking news story published the day after the crash by The Oregonian, Portland’s daily newspaper, detailed how the family had left their Woodland home in a hurry days earlier, after workers from Child Protective Services stopped by to investigate a report of child abuse. Neighbors of the Harts told reporters they’d called CPS after one of the six children, Devonte, age fifteen, had repeatedly come to their house, sometimes late at night, asking for food for himself and his siblings. They said that another sibling, Hannah, sixteen, had once shown up at their door after jumping from a window in her home and told them her mothers were racists and that they were abusing her. But the neighbors didn’t report that incident at the time; Jennifer and the rest of the children came to their house the next morning, the neighbors said, and Hannah robotically apologized.

Still, like the Mendocino sheriff, friends of the Harts were hesitant to believe the crash could have been anything but an accident. Zippy Lomax, a good friend of the Harts since 2012, told The Oregonian, “Jen and Sarah were the kinds of parents this world desperately needs. They loved their kids more than anything else.”

The Oregonian story also noted Devonte Hart’s presence in a 2014 viral photo that CNN had called “The Hug Shared Around the World”: clad in a brown leather jacket, a blue patterned fedora, and blue knit gloves, the then twelve-year-old clutches a police officer; tears are streaming down the boy’s face. The photo was taken at a protest against police brutality in Portland after a grand jury in Ferguson, Missouri, declined to indict Officer Darren Wilson for shooting the unarmed eighteen-year-old Michael Brown six times, killing him. Devonte had been standing in front of the police line, holding a sign that said FREE HUGS.

That photo had moved many, but it had also, Lomax told The Oregonian, led to the family receiving negative attention for being multiracial and having lesbian parents. Lomax said the family felt hounded by the press and misunderstood by outsiders. “They got a lot of negativity from that, and they kind of closed off for a while, honestly,” she explained.

In May 2018, there was finally a breakthrough in the search. A passerby found a pair of pants and a small shoe on the sand in Mendocino, and brought them up to one of the searchers who had been camping on the beach. Closer inspection showed that a decomposed foot was inside the shoe. The clothes seemed likely to be Hannah’s, but initial DNA tests on the remains proved inconclusive.

Devonte Hart, the sibling who received the most national attention, has never been found.

In the early days after the crash, the media presented no information at all about the birth families of the children. Part of the reason for the silence was logistical: Child welfare cases are largely sealed. The adoption agency used by the Harts, which had a history of violations, was now defunct, and former employees weren’t talking. And Texas, where the children were born, wouldn’t even share the names of the birth family members with the police investigating the crime. As is often the case, reporters went where the trail led them, focusing on publicly available records and recollections from friends, family members, and neighbors of the Harts.

Jennifer Hart was a heavy Facebook user whose posts about her family were verbose and always accompanied by well-lit photos of the kids, constantly smiling. Predictably, the media frenzy over the Hart family tragedy emphasized the contrast between Jennifer’s public image and her true intentions and psychological motivations. Stories about the children—who they were, where they came from, what happened to their birth families—were virtually absent. Much of what was written about the kids focused only on their harrowing abuse. And above all, the major question—How could this have happened?—went unanswered.


Copyright © 2023 by Roxanna Asgarian DeBenedetto