num_pages: 320
description: The shocking deeply reported story of a murder-suicide that claimed the lives of six childrenand 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 several children at the bottom of a cliff beside 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 the six Black children from two different Texas families in 2006 and 2008. Behind the family's loving facade however was a pattern of abuse and neglect that went ignored as the couple withdrew the children from school and moved across the country. It soon became apparent that the State of Texas knew very little about the two individuals to whom it had given custody of six childrenwith fateful consequences.In the manner of Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family and other classic works of investigative journalism Roxanna Asgarians We Were Once a Family is a revelation of vulnerable lives; it is also a shattering expos of the foster care and adoption systems that produced this tragedy. As a journalist in Houston Asgarian became the first reporter to put the childrens birth families at the center of the story. We follow the author as she runs up against the intransigence of a state agency that removes tens of thousands of kids from homes each year in the name of child welfare while often failing to consider alternatives. Her reporting uncovers persistent racial biases and corruption as children 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 Americas most vulnerable children while upending the lives of their families.
language: English
title: We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America
publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux