#devonte hart

Donald Glover's series Atlanta is known for pushing the boundaries with its references to real-life situations, particularly around race and social issues. Season 3 of the show opened Thursday on a similar note, retelling the story of an actual 2018 California murder-suicide involving several adopted children from Houston

In March, 2018, the Washington couple Jennifer and Sarah Hart killed their six adopted children by driving off a California cliff. At first, authorities assumed the car crash was an accident. Further investigation revealed that the women had been abusing their children, and had premeditated the plunge as an act of family annihilation.

More compelling — and more challenging — are the racial and economic factors underpinning the tragedy. Jennifer and Sarah, both white, adopted the six children of color. The two went on to use social media and community platforms to curate a picture of harmony, vitality and bliss. The women’s posturing was calculated: Their idyllic facade concealed a pattern of neglect and abuse occurring behind closed doors.

Last week, dozens of pages of reports from child-welfare officials were released that offer harrowing details of the abuse that six Black children suffered at the hands of their adoptive white parents, Jennifer and Sarah Hart, in Washington State.  A drunken Jennifer drove them all off a 100-foot cliff in Northern California in the family’s SUV. Markis, 19, Jeremiah, 14, Abigail, 14, and Ciera, 12, are all confirmed dead; Devonte, 15, and Hannah, 16, remain missing, but are feared dead.

But while the report provides a lot of disturbing details about the degree of physical and emotional abuse, it poses more questions than offers answers, and paints a gruesome portrait of the parents, who beat and starved and gaslighted their children before murdering them all, and committing suicide.

The child-welfare reports revealed that officials in Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington State recorded incidents of neglect and abuse, and people in their communities noticed there was something off. The children were malnourished and were described by neighbors as behaving “like trained robots” and “like little soldiers”; they were forced to raise their hand before speaking; they were punished for laughing at the table and for “stealing” pizza from the fridge when they were hungry. In 2011, Sarah Hart shoved banana and nuts into her daughter Hannah’s mouth after the girl had told the school nurse she hadn’t eaten, and then Sarah said  she was “playing the food card” and to just give her water. School officials witnessed this. Neighbors. Friends. They’d seen the kind of meticulous, orderly and punitive unlivable environment they’d set up for their six beautiful Black children, whose souls they were trying to crush.

Rather than face the consequences of their actions, they chose to flee and kill themselves and their whole family just as they were being pursued by the Department of Social and Health Services, who showed up at their door on March 23, in Washington, to find an empty house. They came, incidentally, following a call it took a neighbor six months to make, after Hannah jumped out of a second-story window at 1:30 a.m. and scrambled into her home asking to be hidden, and telling the neighbor that her racist parents whipped her with belts and begged her not to make her return to the Hart household.

I honestly don’t know what could motivate a parent to exact such abuse on children. And I can’t tell whether these women were trying to, consciously or not, fulfill some deranged modern-day plantation narrative or live out a Blind Side fantasy, but regardless, their position as the racial superior, be it as the slave master or the white savior, was all but assured. They were raising young Black children to be beholden to them, to worship them, to submit to them.

Many people are still trying to make sense of this nightmare. While some of their friends continue to defend the mothers, this case reveals a lot of discomforting truths about race in America. One: Why are their friends still defending them? Two: Why, when there were members of the children’s own family availing themselves to care for them, did the system insist on placing the children with the Harts? And after so many citations in so many states, why didn’t anyone intervene and sooner?

The complicity of systems that conspired to keep these children in these women’s care is as violent as the household in which they were enslaved. These pages of documents can attest that these children were far from safe. That this could have been stopped before it was literally too late.

The Hart children are not an isolated incident either: Cassandra Killpack, Michael Tinning, Hannah Grace-Rose Williams, Lydia Schatz, Timothy Boss, Hana Williams, Ahmad King are Black adoptees murdered by their white adoptive parents. 

You wonder why. Why did these parents take in these children and kill them? And why were they not screened carefully? Why was no one paying attention to allegations of abuse?

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This article was posted on May 2, 2018. I’m just now learning about it. Either this story went viral and I missed it or it was quietly reported to not further boost the concern of white families “raising” Black children to live out their racist fantasies, abusing them, and using them as “the help.” I’m going with the latter. They swept that under the rug like they do with other acts of white violence and hostility. Case in point: domestic terrorism. (That’s a whole nother topic.)

All of the Hart children, except for Devonte who’s still listed as “missing,” have been reported to be dead since that article was made due to their remains being found. 

Y’all remember little Devonte, right?

This Hart family is the same white couple who made Devonte do that fake ass photo op during a Ferguson rally in Portland that went viral as “the Ferguson hug” to “restore faith in humanity” by the media for white (and non-white) “it’s not about race” people to eat up in the midst of the heightened and evident police brutality against Black people. 

She can literally go choke

Choke today, quickly.

I saw it everywhere, but only because I regularly kept up with the news (I now limit my intake for my own well being). His picture was everywhere when he could be used as a prop and you had to closely pay attention to the news to learn the truth.

She also searched the following things:

“Can 500 mgs of Benadryl kill a 120-pound woman?”

“Is death by drowning relatively painless?”