Hey waves listeners just before you jump in I want to make a note that there was an error in a

previous version of this episode. We've corrected it. It's later in the episode as my guests and I

are talking about some well-known cases. We've updated the episode to correctly reflect that it

was Andrea Yeats who murdered her five children.

Hello and welcome to the waves Slates podcast about gender, feminism, and today a story that

complicates so many of our social narratives. Every episode you get a new pair of women to talk

about the thing that we cannot get off of our minds and today you've got me, Daisy Rosario,

senior supervising producer of audio here at Slate and I'll be talking to journalist Roxana

Azgarian about her new book We Were Once a Family. You may remember this big news story from 2018.

A married white lesbian couple, Jennifer and Sarah Hart murdered the six black children that

they had adopted by driving the family SUV off of a cliff in California. The story gained extra

attention when it was discovered that one of the kids killed, Davante Davis, had been in a photo

that went viral in 2014. The famous picture was of a crying Davante hugging a police officer at a

Black Lives Matter protest in Oregon. In the years since the story has become well-known among true

crime fans, but with her new book Roxana Azgarian is finally telling the story from the perspectives we

usually do not hear. Roxana tells the story of the birth families left behind. The six children

themselves came from two different families in Texas and how these children ended up being

adopted out of state in the first place. Now obviously the fact that the adoptive women were white

and the children were black means that race plays a factor in this story. But I wanted to talk to Roxana

here on the waves because this story also deeply intersects with so many of the other topics we often

discuss on a show about feminism and gender. Things like bodily autonomy, issues of mental health and

even addiction in women and mothers, how our traumas impact us and change how we live, how we

...