SPECIAL REPORT
Two White Moms. Six Black Kids. One Unthinkable Tragedy. A Look Inside the ?Perfect? Hart Family.
LAUREN SMILEY
SEPTEMBER 6, 2018 8:00 AM
HOLLY ANDRES
The cliff is exactly the kind of place Jennifer Hart loved to photograph her kids for Facebook. It has a green-edged bluff right off California's Highway 1, with a gravel strip leading straight to a dramatic, 100-foot drop into the Pacific. In other circumstances, on other trips, Jen and her wife, Sarah, might have pulled to the side of the road and lined up their brood as they often did: backs to the camera, hands raised in peace signs, a Technicolor sunset framing their silhouettes. They were Markis, 19, Hannah, 16, Devonte, 15, Abigail, 14, Jeremiah, 14, and Sierra, 12?two sets of black biological siblings adopted by two white moms?a beautiful family, by most accounts. Friends called them the Hart Tribe.
From left: Hannah, Abigail, Sierra, Jeremiah, Jen, Devonte, Markis, and Sarah Hart at a Bernie Sanders rally in Vancouver, Washington, in 2016. The family often wore matching T-shirts.
TRISTAN FORTSCH
But the photo from March 26 would not be like the other pictures taken on countless family road trips. The photo the world saw from that day was of the family Yukon belly-up on the rocks below the scenic overpass. After rescue workers rappelled down the cliff, they lifted the dead bodies of three children and spotted two more corpses: 38-year-old Sarah in the back and Jen, also 38, in the driver's seat. The coroner found diphenhydramine, an ingredient commonly found in allergy medicines like Benadryl, in the bodies of Sarah and two of the kids; Jen's blood alcohol content was over the legal limit. No one had been wearing a seatbelt. The car's computer revealed that Jen had stopped on a gravel pullout some 70 feet from the cliff moments before the freefall, and then accelerated. "I'm to the point where I no longer am calling this as an accident," the county sheriff declared 10 days later. "I'm calling it a crime."
Back near the Harts' home in Woodland, Washington, 561 miles to the north, Dana DeKalb had yet to hear any of the gruesome details, but when she saw the pictures of the overturned vehicle on TV, she immediately turned to her husband: "That's our neighbors."
Within a day of the crash, news vans pulled into the gravel driveway that forks to the DeKalbs' red split-level on the left and the Harts' baby-blue one on the right, both built in the seventies by two brothers who'd divided the property. The couple walked outside to meet the onslaught?Dana's voice trembling; her husband Bruce looking on stoically. Two weeks later they greeted a man from South Dakota who identified himself as Sarah's dad, out with his son and wife to pick up some personal effects.
Dana DeKalb is an earthy 58-year-old who tracks her steps with a Samsung smartwatch when she's not chatting into it with her two grown children. Two decades ago she and Bruce moved from a California cul-de-sac to this spot in the foothills of the Cascades, where you can see clear to Mt. St. Helens. Their days usually include some beating back of the Washington wild, then a venture on Jet Ski or kayak.
Bruce and Dana DeKalb at home in Woodland, Washington in July 2018
HOLLY ANDRES
At the end of last summer, their retirement idyll was interrupted when a small, frightened girl wrapped in a fleece blanket rang their doorbell at 1:30 in the morning. There were twigs in her hair, Bruce noticed as he opened the door. Her front teeth were missing. Frantically, the girl explained that she lived next door and had jumped out her second-floor window. "Hide me," she pleaded. "They whip us with a belt."
In the three months the new neighbors had lived next door, the DeKalbs had never seen any kids in yard, but they'd exchanged a quick quick hello with Sarah Hart when she jumped out of her car to introduce herself. (Jen had remained behind the wheel.)
Now this young girl bolted past Bruce, up the steps, and into the bedroom where Dana was sleeping. "You gotta help. Please protect me! Don't make me go back!" she said, waking Dana. "They're racists, and they abuse us!"
Flashlights soon strobed over the front yard, followed by voices calling, "Hannah!" Several kids and two women stood at the DeKalbs? door. Without asking permission, Sarah and Jen entered the house, looking all over before jetting upstairs to the bedroom, where Hannah was balled up between the bed and dresser. There, Jen took charge and Dana?still bleary, she says, from an herbal supplement she'd taken for her insomnia?agreed to leave mother and daughter in the room alone. When Hannah padded back down the stairs a minute later, she stared straight ahead.
"You need to tell these people you're sorry," Jen said.
"Yes, ma'am."
"And you need to explain you just had a really bad week."
"Yes, ma'am."
Dana planned to call Child Protective Services in the morning. But at 6:30 A.M., the DeKalb's doorbell rang. They ignored it. An hour later it rang again.
This time the DeKalbs relented and opened the door to see the entire Hart family standing in a row. Both mothers were there, but it was Jen who talked for nearly an hour. She said the kids were adopted and had been "drug babies." She said Hannah was 12, and that her mom had been bipolar. (Twelve? Dana thought, looking at Hannah, the shortest member of the bunch. She looked much younger.) Hannah?s teeth were missing, Jen continued, because she'd knocked them out in a fall and didn't want them replaced. The kids were homeschooled because one of the boys, Devonte, had been bullied.
"Why?" the DeKalbs asked.
"Hello?" Jen said. "We're two lesbian moms with six black kids."
She told the DeKalbs they'd moved to Washington?to a place with a grazing pasture and a hen house?because it had been the kids' dream to raise animals, grow their own food, and be "self-sufficient." She said that Sarah was an assistant manager at Kohl?s 20 minutes down the highway. When she mentioned that their oldest son, Markis, was 19, Bruce piped up, "You must be getting ready to leave the house, then?"
Jen answered for him: "We certainly hope he's not leaving."
Dana asked if she could have a moment alone with Hannah, but Jen declined: "We do everything as a family," she said.
Then Hannah handed over a note she had scrawled in green letters.
A note 16-year-old Hannah gave the DeKalbs after begging them to ?protect? her in 2017. It reads: "I stopped this morning because I feel awful about disturbing your peace and worring [sic] you in the middle of the night. I was very frustrated with my brother and didn't handle things very maturely, and I'm sorry for telling lies to get attention. I'm working on being more honest and find better ways to communicate my frustrations. I've been pretty sad about 2 of our cats dying recently, so I was just very sad and frustrated last night. Thank you for being kind."
HOLLY ANDRES
Dana didn't think the note sounded like something a child would write?the language smacked of parental coaching. But it also introduced an element of doubt into the equation. What if Hannah was a kid with a troubled past who lied to get attention? Plus, Jen had explained everything with such breezy confidence. "She sold it well," Dana recalls. "She was good."
She still wanted to report what had happened, but her husband was reluctant to create drama with the new neighbors?especially after a years-long dispute with a previous owner over the property line. "Bruce doesn't do confrontation," she says. But she eventually told her 80-year-old dad about Hannah's visit. Two months later Dana's dad, Steve Frkovich, called 911, telling the dispatcher, "I just can't sit with this. I believe those kids are being highly abused." Someone from the county sheriff's office called the DeKalbs to ask whether there had been more incidents, and Dana explained what she had observed: The kids were almost always indoors. She remembers being told, "It's not illegal to keep kids inside." There was no other follow-up.
A Clark County Sheriff's Office spokesman later pointed to the the lapse of time and the fact that Dana hadn?t witnessed any more incidents in the interim. "There was nothing [in that call] that said I better go up there,? says County Sergeant Brent Waddell. ?There wasn?t anything we could have done.?
Eventually, Dana would learn that Hannah was actually 16. But by then it was too late.
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