What the Hart Family Murders Reveal About Foster Care
The Waves: Gender, Relationships, Feminism
Slate Podcasts
4.2 • 903 Ratings
🗓️ 30 March 2023
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week’s episode of The Waves, Slate supervising producer Daisy Rosario is joined by Texas Tribune reporter Roxanna Asgarian to discuss her book We Were Once A Family: A Story of Love, Death and Child Removal in America and its findings on the foster care system. The book covers the tragic Hart family murders in 2018 where two mothers drove their six adopted children off a cliff.
In Slate Plus: How Roxanna navigated writing about a tragic family story in a pandemic while being a first-time mom.
Podcast production by Cheyna Roth and Tori Dominguez with editorial oversight by Daisy Rosario and Alicia Montgomery.
Send your comments and recommendations on what to cover to thewaves@slate.com.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | You're listening ad-free on Amazon Music. |
| 0:03.5 | 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. |
| 0:09.5 | We've corrected it. |
| 0:11.5 | It's later in the episode. |
| 0:13.0 | As my guest and I are talking about some well-known cases, we've updated the episode to correctly reflect that it was Andrea Yates who murdered her five children. |
| 0:34.9 | Hello and welcome to The Waves, Slate's podcast about gender, feminism, and today, a story that complicates so many of our social narratives. |
| 0:43.8 | Every episode, you get a new pair of women to talk about the thing that we cannot get off of our minds. |
| 0:48.6 | And today you've got me, Daisy Rosario, senior supervising producer of audio here at Slate. |
| 0:53.4 | And I'll be talking to journalist Roxanna |
| 0:55.7 | Asgarian about her new book, We Were Once a Family. You may remember this big news story from 2018. |
| 1:03.4 | A married white lesbian couple, Jennifer and Sarah Hart, murdered the six black children that they |
| 1:08.9 | had adopted by driving the family SUV off of a cliff in California. |
| 1:13.5 | The story gained extra attention when it was discovered that one of the kids killed, Devante Davis, |
| 1:19.1 | had been in a photo that went viral in 2014. The famous picture was of a crying Devante hugging a police officer at a Black Lives Matter protest in Oregon. |
| 1:29.9 | In the years since, the story has become well known among true crime fans. But with her new book, |
| 1:35.6 | Roxanna Asgarian is finally telling the story from the perspectives we usually do not hear. |
| 1:40.7 | Roxanna tells the story of the birth families left behind. The six children themselves came from two |
| 1:45.7 | different families in Texas, and how these children ended up being adopted out of state in the first |
| 1:50.4 | place. Now, obviously, the fact that the adoptive women were white and the children were black |
| 1:55.5 | means that race plays a factor in this story. But I wanted to talk to Roxanna here on the waves because this story |
| 2:02.0 | also deeply intersects with so many of the other topics we often discuss on a show about |
| 2:07.1 | feminism and gender. Things like bodily autonomy, issues of mental health and even addiction |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Slate Podcasts, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Slate Podcasts and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.