Book Review: We Were Once a Family

We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America by Roxanna Asgarian (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023).

I’ll warn you right up front, this book deals with the horrific topics of child abuse and, ultimately, murder/suicide. You may have some memory of the book’s subjects, the six Hart children, who made headlines in 2018 when their adoptive parents drugged them and drove them off a cliff into the ocean.

In short, this is a very tough read. But I was drawn to it by a personal connection with the child welfare system that gave these kids such a raw deal. My sister, adopted into our family at age five, spent some very bad years in foster care before that. It’s her story to tell, not mine, so I’ll say only that, having heard her tell that story, I’ve regarded the system with a jaundiced eye since I was old enough to know what it was.

According to We Were Once a Family, things have not improved since then.

In stark prose, Roxanna Asgarian tells the wrenching story of how these six children were taken from Black and biracial birth families who still wanted them and were trying hard to keep them. After being adopted by white couple Jennifer and Sarah Hart, the children were publicly paraded around as an example of the perfect, loving, inclusive family. But while Jennifer was gushing all over Facebook about how she and Sarah had saved the kids from worse than death and created a utopian existence for them, the kids were showing bruises to their teachers, and begging schoolmates for food. One of the girls, Hannah, was so malnourished at age 16 that a neighbor, at first glance, thought she was six.

Since the day Jennifer and Sarah killed themselves and the children, various articles and podcasts have dug into the women’s lives, trying to determine why they did what they did. But Asgarian wasn’t interested in giving the women even more attention. (She notes with contempt a sheriff’s comparison of Jennifer and Sarah to Thelma and Louise, reminding us, “There are no children in the backseat in Thelma & Louise.”) Instead, she went looking for the children’s stories. She found two biological families bereft over their losses—losses that had made no sense even before the children were murdered.

Priscilla Celestine, the biological aunt of three of the kids, had once petitioned to adopt her nephews and niece. She was a churchgoing, hardworking woman with a stable home to offer. But the children were taken from her care, sent across state lines, and, as their biological mother puts it, given to “monsters,” while Celestine was still appealing the original decision against her.

Asgarian, a journalist with the Texas Tribune, has done her research thoroughly, getting to the very roots of how this travesty took place. Among other things, she highlights the clear double standard that disproportionately penalizes Black families who have to deal with the system—and disproportionately throws them into it in the first place.

Priscilla Celestine lost the children in her care because of one slip: In a crunch, she had let their biological mother, Sherry Davis, look after them, against court orders. On the other hand, Jennifer Hart was investigated by the police for hitting Hannah hard enough to leave marks, yet the Harts’ adoption of the Davis children proceeded without a hitch. Sarah Hart later pleaded guilty to domestic assault against another child, Abigail, but was not required to serve time. “Where the Davis family had encountered resistance in the system,” Asgarian summarizes with dry understatement, “the Harts were met with the benefit of the doubt.”

This isn’t just a single instance of abuse of the system. Asgarian traces a pattern through the decades of Black families being torn apart for the kind of infractions that white families get away with all the time. She also examines other forces that work against children’s best interests, including greed, the worship of efficiency, and political incentives. She quotes Michigan child welfare reform advocate Vivek Sankaran as saying, “The number one thing that bothers me about how we conduct business in foster care is that we’ve lost key concepts like humanity, dignity. We’re prioritizing compliance and the needs of bureaucracy.”

All these abuses and failures cut across ideologies and belief systems. It was a deeply conservative Texas court that severed the Davis children from their family and let them be handed over to the deeply progressive Harts, who would eventually murder them. On the flip side, Asgarian points out, both progressives and conservatives are currently working to reform the child welfare system that so tragically failed those six children.

It’s a sliver of hope in a story that doesn’t have much. There are heroes in this book—like Nathaniel Davis, the stepfather who turned his life upside down for the children of a wife who treated him callously—but sadly, they are few and far between.

For all her training as an objective journalist, Asgarian couldn’t help getting sucked into these families’ lives—helping them to find support and resources, even eventually getting their children’s ashes to them. And readers can’t help getting sucked in right along with her. She’s given us a book that’s a heavy load and a precious gift all in one: a reminder that it’s the children who are supposed to benefit from the system who are most often overlooked, exploited, and punished by it. Stories like these remind us to keep our focus on these kids and their needs, undistracted by the self-interested clamor of the adults around them, and not to turn away. I started to learn this when I was three, but it’s a lesson that can’t be hammered home often enough.

(Cover image copyright Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Book Links:

We Were Once a Family on Amazon
We Were Once a Family on Bookshop