Review: Roxanna Asgarian’s deep reporting on one notorious tragedy sheds light on a bureaucracy responsible for more than 400,000 children
Jennifer and Sarah Hart were a White married couple, together since college, who adopted a set of three biracial siblings in 2006 and three Black siblings two years later. All six adopted children — Ciera, Abigail, Jeremiah, Devonte, Hannah and Markis — came from the Texas foster-care system. For 10 years, Jen maintained a flamboyant Facebook presence, filled with adorable photos of the children, proclamations of Black allyship, and proud endorsements of meditation and vegetarianism.
Even so, the local sheriff cast it as “a ‘Thelma and Louise’ situation” — two harried idealists, done in by the pressures of a world gone mad. This prompted the journalist Roxanna Asgarian to wonder why so few people were saying what actually happened. “What is drugging your family and driving them off a cliff,” she asks, “if not murder?”
Asgarian begins with a powerfully rendered narrative of how the second set of three children the Harts adopted — Ciera, Devonte and Jeremiah — were caught up in the wheels of a Texas family court plagued by cronyism, xenophobia and a zeal for placing children anywhere but near their families. The children’s mother, Sherry Davis, was a drug user, but her partner, Nathaniel, much older and not living with Sherry, was a more-than-ideal caregiver for the children.
The children are killed with more than 100 pages left in the book. It is here that Asgarian fully steps into the narrative, developing deep personal ties with the children’s birth parents, their partners, their other children and their caseworkers, getting to understand the depths of their impossible life situations and the institutional neglect.
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