5 Years After Mendocino Crash, Journalist Roxanna Asgarian Retells the Stories of the Children Murdered

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KQED

Politics, News, News Commentary

4.6 • 656 Ratings

🗓️ 12 April 2023

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 2018, six children — Ciera, Abigail, Jeremiah, Devonte, Hannah and Markis — were murdered by their adoptive parents, Jennifer and Sarah Hart, who also committed suicide when they drove their family off of a cliff in Mendocino. The Harts were white; their adopted children were Black and mixed race. Much of the news coverage focused on the Harts, their motivations and history. But a new book by journalist Roxanna Asgarian traces the murdered children’s stories through the perspectives of their birth families. We’ll hear those stories along with the failures of the foster and adoptive systems they expose from Asgarian, whose book is titled “We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America.” Guests: Roxanna Asgarian, law and courts reporter, The Texas Tribune; author, “We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:32.6	... From KQBD in San Francisco, I'm Mina Kim. Coming up on forum, you may remember the shocking story five years ago of a couple that intentionally drove their SUV off a Northern California cliff, killing their six adopted children inside.
1:02.0	The story spawned national news coverage and documentaries asking how the adoptive parents could have done this, What were the women's backgrounds and what was going
1:11.4	through their heads? But a new book by journalist Roxanna Asgarian traces the children's stories
1:17.5	and those of their birth families torn apart by the failures of Texas' foster system. We'll find
1:23.5	out what Asgarian learned after this news.
1:36.1	Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim.
1:41.9	In 2018, Jennifer and Sarah Hart murdered their six adopted children,
1:47.2	Devante, Jeremiah, Sierra, Abigail, Hannah, and Marcus,
1:52.7	when they deliberately drove them off a Mendocino cliff. The parents were white, their adopted children, black, and mixed race. Reported Roxanna Asgarian, unlike many who investigated or
1:58.7	covered the shocking murder suicide, was not focused on the
2:02.7	heart's psychological motivation. Asgarian says, what motivated her most was to see and share
2:09.6	the children themselves and the birth families they came from, the parts of the story, she says,
	...

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