https://getpocket.com/explore/item/two-white-moms-six-black-kids-one-unthinkable-tragedy-a-look-inside-the-perfect-hart-familyby Lauren Smiley,
GlamourSeptember 6, 2018
The cliff is exactly the kind of place Jennifer Hart loved to photograph her kids for Facebook. It has a green-edged bluff right off California's Highway 1, with a gravel strip leading straight to a dramatic 100-foot drop into the Pacific. In other circumstances, on other trips, Jen and her wife, Sarah, might have pulled to the side of the road and lined up their brood as they often did: backs to the camera, hands raised in peace signs, a Technicolor sunset framing their silhouettes. They were Markis, 19, Hannah, 16, Devonte, 15, Abigail, 14, Jeremiah, 14, and Sierra, 12—two sets of black biological siblings adopted by two white moms—a beautiful family, by most accounts. Friends called them the Hart Tribe.
But the photo from March 26 would not be like the other pictures taken on countless family road trips. The photo the world saw from that day was of the family Yukon belly-up on the rocks below the scenic overpass. After rescue workers rappelled down the cliff, they lifted the dead bodies of three children and spotted two more corpses: 38-year-old Sarah in the back and Jen, also 38, in the driver's seat. The coroner found diphenhydramine, an ingredient commonly found in allergy medicines like Benadryl, in the bodies of Sarah and two of the kids; Jen's blood alcohol content was over the legal limit. No one had been wearing a seatbelt. The car's computer revealed that Jen had stopped on a gravel pullout some 70 feet from the cliff moments before the free fall, and then accelerated. "I'm to the point where I no longer am calling this as an accident," the county sheriff declared 10 days later. "I'm calling it a crime."
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