We Were Once a Family
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Average rating3.5
“A riveting indictment of the child welfare system . . . [A] bracing gut punch of a book.” —Robert Kolker, The Washington Post “[A] moving and superbly reported book.” —Jessica Winter, The New Yorker “A harrowing account . . . [and] a powerful critique of [the] foster care system . . . We Were Once a Family is a wrenching book.” —Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice The shocking, deeply reported story of a murder-suicide that claimed the lives of six children—and a searing indictment of the American foster care system. On March 26, 2018, rescue workers discovered a crumpled SUV and the bodies of two women and multiple children at the bottom of a cliff along the Pacific Coast Highway. Investigators soon concluded that the crash was a murder-suicide, but there was more to the story: Jennifer and Sarah Hart, it turned out, were a white married couple who had adopted six Black children from two different Texas families in 2006 and 2008. Behind the family’s loving facade was an alleged pattern of abuse and neglect that had been ignored as the couple withdrew the children from school and moved west. It soon became apparent that the State of Texas knew all too little about the two individuals to whom it had given custody of six children. Immersive journalism of the highest order, Roxanna Asgarian’s We Were Once a Family is a revelation of precarious lives; it is also a shattering exposé of the foster care and adoption systems that produced this tragedy. As a journalist in Houston, Asgarian sought out the children’s birth families and put them at the center of the story. We follow the lives of the Harts’ adopted children and their birth parents, and the machinations of the state agency that sent the children far away. Asgarian’s reporting uncovers persistent racial biases and corruption as young people of color are separated from birth parents without proper cause. The result is a riveting narrative and a deeply reported indictment of a system that continues to fail America’s most vulnerable children while upending the lives of their families.
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Really brutal and upsetting portrayal of the child welfare system. I honestly can't rate this - I don't want to - because some of the content was too distressing: what happened to those six kids is such an enormous failure of society. This is an investigative journalist's look into the 2018 Hart murder-suicide, with a special emphasis on the adopted childrens' biological families and histories.
I was actually reminded of the Kim Philby biography - about a British good ol' boy who turned out to be a Cold War double agent, working for the Russians for 30+ years. That book - and this book - stressed how “looking the part”, whether that be two “normal seeming” white women in South Dakota or a normal-seeming Eton/Cambridge guy, can hide real monstrosities. Except these two women did something so appalling to read: a lesbian couple who rush-adopted six Black children and then trapped them in a nightmare of abuse, all while posting self-serving social media “performance parenting”, before murdering them in a suicide-murder. It's just so terribly sad, and the author makes it a point to centralize the systemic failures which led to this - it is, indeed, nuts that a couple could adopt so quickly, with so little oversight, and with so many red flags accumulating. It just makes you want to scream.
Anyway. I spent much of the book asking myself why I was reading this. It felt voyeuristic and was so upsetting. If you have an interest in the foster care system, it's definitely of interest - but just be careful about the contents. Lots of interesting points about transracial adoption.