We Were Once a Family

Starred review from January 9, 2023
Journalist Asgarian debuts with a comprehensive and searing look at systemic issues within the foster care and adoption systems through the eyes of two Texas families whose Black and biracial children were removed from their homes, adopted, abused, and killed in a deliberate murder-suicide car crash by their white adoptive mothers in 2018. Over and over, Asgarian finds that wherever the children’s birth relatives “encountered resistance in the system,” the adoptive parents were given the benefit of the doubt, despite evidence of long-term abuse. Instead of focusing—as most contemporaneous news reports did—on the “dark psychological problems” of the adoptive married couple, Jennifer and Sarah Hart, Asgarian centers the birth families, interviewing the birth mothers whose parental rights were terminated and extended family members who had been seeking custody of the children, and describing the lingering trauma of the children’s surviving family, including the siblings who weren’t adopted. Emotional and frequently enraging, it adds up to a blistering indictment of a system where, in the words of one reform advocate, “we’ve lost key concepts like humanity, dignity. We’re prioritizing compliance and the needs of bureaucracy.” Throughout, Asgarian makes clear that the endemic failures that led to this shocking tragedy continue to affect countless families caught up in the child welfare system. Sensitive, impassioned, and eye-opening, this is a must-read.

February 15, 2023
A searching examination of a foster-care system that harms children more than it helps. Asgarian, who covers the courts and the law for the Texas Tribune, takes as her point of departure a story from 2018, when six adopted children and their adoptive parents died after those parents, fleeing child-abuse investigations, drove over a cliff into the Pacific Ocean. The story made the news for all the usual sensational reasons, not least that one of the children had become a social media meme with a photograph that showed him hugging a police officer during an anti-racism protest. Look closely at that photograph, notes the author, and it's clear that the child is begging for help. "The reality was that the children had not been okay," she writes. "They had not been cared for. They suffered, and then they died. They were murdered." The children were all Black, with adoptive White parents who'd been gaming the system to earn income as providers while keeping them half-starved. Asgarian deepens the story with an examination of the trajectory of an older sibling who had aged out of the foster system and been placed in a residential treatment center. As the author notes, that is all too often a direct path to prison. It certainly was in the case of the young man, who years later may have his own child separated from the family and placed in foster care. Asgarian clearly shows how the dysfunctional system hinges on racist assumptions, including that "these six Black children must be better off with the white women who adopted them" than with their Black birthparents or relatives, even though responsible relatives were available and willing to help. Asgarian closes by pointing out how the approach that punishes needy families instead of working to improve their conditions "does nothing to help the children," and she is entirely convincing in that conclusion. A sobering call to action demanding reform of the child-protective and foster-care regimes.

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Starred review from February 1, 2023
In March of 2018, two women deliberately drove themselves and their six children off a cliff into the Pacific Ocean. Details about the family slowly emerged, including allegations of abuse and neglect, but while there was considerable speculation about the parents, who were married and both white, the media paid little attention to the six Black children, who had been adopted from two different families. Author and investigative reporter Asgarian spent five years getting to know the birth families of these young victims, and her work uncovers a devastating web of intergenerational poverty, drug use, violence, and wrenching separations as well as a bleak indictment of the foster care system. Asgarian describes how she tracked down relatives, in almost every instance having to inform them of their family members' death in the crash. This personal narrative twines around a history of the arbitrary, woefully inadequate legislation and funding at both state and federal levels accorded to orphaned and foster children in the U.S. What happened to these kids is a tragedy, and the ongoing failings of the foster system are insupportable. News of the shocking story garnered substantial attention, so expect considerable interest in Asgarian's thoroughly researched and revelatory retelling.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.