A FAMILY’S DARK SECRETS UNCOVERED The shocking plot that drove two mothers to kill their own kids
2 MOTHERS, 6 KIDS PLUNGE TO DEATH Sarah and Jennifer Hart seemed to have a perfect life with the six children they adopted. But a year after their deaths, police reveal the shocking plot that drove them to kill
The “Hart tribe,” as Sarah and Jennifer Hart called their family, regularly set off in Jen’s SUV “adventure mobile” for outings she turned into glossy Facebook posts – taking the six children they had adopted on 30 hikes in 30 days, or a “Random Acts of Kindness tour” of walking rescue dogs and picking up rubbish. But the impromptu 54-hour road trip that the family began in the dark of night on March 23, 2018, was different. One of their first stops, as Jen drove the gold Yukon SUV away from the family’s latest home in Woodland, Washington, US, towards the cliffside southbound Pacific Coast Highway, was at a Walmart store. There, according to police, Sarah bought a bottle of generic Benadryl. Within hours she was on her phone – not posting a travelogue to social media but plotting death.“What will happen when overdosing with Benadryl?” Sarah googled at one point. At another: “How long does it take to die from hypothermia in water while drowning in a car?”
“This case is a shock to the nation’s conscience”
–Sheriff Tom Allman
By the afternoon of March 26, California Highway Patrol discovered the SUV upside down in the crashing surf beneath a 30-metre cliff off the roadway. Both mums were found dead inside, and three of the children were dead nearby; the other three missing presumed dead.
The local Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman swiftly decided it was no accident and disbelieving friends reeled. “What did we miss?” asked friend Zippy Lomax.
Another, Riannah Weaver, tells WHO, “Maybe we didn’t know them at all.”
Whatever those friends didn’t see, investigators were determined to uncover. In the year since the crash they have pieced together – through search warrants, records searches and interviews – a troubling trail of marital strain, mental illness and child-abuse allegations that followed Jen and Sarah from Minnesota to Oregon to Washington state right up until the very day they fled their Woodland home. With no-one to put on trial, Allman, who also serves as Mendocino’s coroner, took the unusual step of convening 14 jurors and presenting evidence in a twoday coroner’s inquest. The jury’s unanimous finding on April 4 was Jen and Sarah, both 38, killed their six children
– Markis, 19, Hannah, 16, Devonte, 15, Jeremiah and Abigail, both 14, and Sierra, 12 – in a murder-suicide by intentionally driving off the oceanside cliff.
Details of the mums’ plot were horrifying. Jen was driving drunk, and Sarah had toxic levels of the antihistamine Benadryl in her
system. The children, none of them wearing seat belts, were “more than likely unconscious or asleep” from excessive doses of the generic Benadryl, California Highway Patrol Officer Jake Slates testified.
Abigail’s body bore pre-existing bruises, suggesting she was abused up until her murder. All six children were ejected from the vehicle on impact; three of their bodies were recovered at the scene, Sierra was found later. All that washed up of Hannah was her foot, and Devonte’s remains have not been found.
“This was more than a crime,” says Allman, the sheriff. “This was an out-and-out conspiracy to kill six kids.” Even worse, says Allman, if child-abuse reporting was shared among the states, the kids might still be alive: “These ladies were always one step ahead of Child Protective Services.”
After meeting the Harts in 2013, Nusheen Bakhtiar felt like she got to see the imperfect family behind the happy Facebook veneer. Yes, the kids – two sets of biological siblings adopted three at a time before Jen and Sarah married in 2009 – happily played with their menagerie of pets, cared about current events and “danced unapologetically”, Bakhtiar says. “But there was the reality of what it was like to be two lesbians and six black children.” She says bigots came out of the woodwork when the family gained some fame after a photo of Devonte went viral (see left), and Sarah, who worked as a retail manager, and Jen, a stay-at-home mum who struggled with depression, felt alone. “They thought that if they reached out for help,” says Bakhtiar, “the kids would be taken.”
But CPS records uncovered during the inquest show it was the kids who needed help. Between 2010 and 2011, Minnesota Child Welfare received six reports of abuse or neglect by Jen and Sarah, including from a teacher concerned about bruises on Abigail, then 6. In April 2011, Sarah pled guilty to assaulting the girl and received a year of supervised probation. Soon after, the mums switched all six kids to home-schooling. At least one child-services report against the Harts in Oregon remains sealed. In Woodland, neighbours Dana and Bruce DeKalb still struggle with their decision to report the Harts.
In March 2018, seven months after Hannah stormed into the DeKalbs’ home in the early morning hours, begging to be protected from her “abusive” mums (see box), Devonte began secretly coming around for food, telling Dana and Bruce that his mums withheld food as punishment. On that March 23, Dana called CPS. Jen’s gold SUV was in the driveway when a caseworker knocked at the Harts’ door. No-one answered, so the caseworker stuck her business card in the door. When investigators returned the next day, the business card, the SUV and the family – already on their fateful drive – were gone. “Because I reported, they took off and killed these kids,” Dana says.
Sheriff Allman blames only the Harts
– and a patchwork system of oversight that allowed Jen and Sarah to get away with abuse. He’s now calling for a national database of child-abuse and neglect reports. “There could have been an opportunity to determine that these six kids were not in a safe family,” he says.
For her part, Bakhtiar says she wants to honour the six children by taking up causes that were dear to them. “There is,” she says, “still light in the darkness.”