Evidence in Hart family crash on Mendocino Coast to be released publicly during coroner’s inquest

There is no one left to be held accountable for the startling and tragic deaths last spring of Jen and Sarah Hart and their six kids.

But Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman is still going to present the case to a jury to help put to rest lingering questions that have persisted for more than 10 months - since the unthinkable drew the eyes of the nation toward a Highway 1 pullout on the northern Mendocino Coast.

It was there, atop a 100-foot cliff near Westport, that Jen Hart drove her wife and their adoptive children off the edge and plunged to the tidal rocks below intentionally, or so investigators believe.

The family had left their home in Woodland, Washington, outside Vancouver, two or three days earlier, fleeing the attention of child welfare investigators as the couple had done in other states, in earlier years.

Toxicology tests after the crash showed Jen Hart had an intoxicating level of alcohol in her system. Her wife and at least several kids had ingested antihistamine, a sedative, investigators said.

Examination of the car showed Jen Hart had accelerated from a dead stop over the side of the cliff. None of the passengers was wearing a seatbelt at the time of the crash, authorities said.

It’s a case that has proved heart-wrenching and riveting amid revelations of family secrets that suggested all was not well at home, despite outward appearances suggesting otherwise.

There were stories of disciplinary and child-rearing techniques that included withholding food as punishment, eliciting questions from friends and families with whom the Harts broke off relations as a result.

The weeks before their hasty flight from Woodland were marked by one child’s desperate pleas that a neighbor couple provide food for him and his siblings, until they alerted child protective services - unwanted attention that apparently drove the family to California, where they died.

Jen and Sarah Hart, who adopted their children in Texas two groups at a time, already had left homes in Alexandria, Minnesota, and West Linn, Oregon, after child welfare authorities became involved there. In Minnesota, Sarah Hart pleaded guilty to domestic assault after one of the girls, Abigail, then 6, turned up at school with bruises all over her torso, even though she told her teacher it was Jen Hart who inflicted the wounds.

The kids were pulled from school the next day and never attended formal school again.

It remains a mystery what they or Sarah Hart knew of Jen Hart’s plan, if she had one, eight years later as they sat in the family car on the Mendocino Coast.

But there was enough evidence collected in the first eight days to convince Allman the crash was not an accident and a crime had been committed, he said.

Now, with nearly a year passed since the tragedy, he’s preparing a coroner’s inquest - the first in maybe 60 years or more on the North Coast - as a means of laying bare before a jury and the public everything that’s known about the family’s history. Jurors can decide in a transparent forum whether the crash was accidental, a murder-suicide committed by Jen Hart, or a conspiracy in which both parents were knowing participants, Allman said.

It’s a decision the sheriff, as county coroner, could and often does make, with his staff, as part of his legal charge to determine the cause and manner of death of all cases that come before him.

Though it’s seldom used in most counties, a coroner’s inquest remains an available legal tool to inquire into sudden, violent or unusual deaths. It has the added bonus of being conducted during open public proceedings that are something like a grand jury hearing, with a single attorney serving as a kind of moderator to oversee the process. Jurors are selected from the regular jury pool called to serve on county court trials.

Allman has consulted with officials in Contra Costa County, where inquests are conducted multiple times a year to resolve inmate deaths, for example. A contract attorney who has conducted more than 100 cases in Contra Costa County is being hired to conduct the inquest in Mendocino County, Allman said.

Allman said he hopes to livestream the inquest, hopefully some time in April.

“My main intention is to allow the facts to become public,” Allman said. “If this were a crime in which one of the adults had survived, this information might have been made public at a trial. Possibly. The public has a lot of questions.”

The GMC Yukon that once took Jen Hart and her six kids to music festivals and national parks while Sarah Hart held down jobs at home, most recently as an assistant manager at Kohl’s, ended up on its roof at the bottom of a coastal cliff.

A German tourist spotted it the night of March 26. Everyone in the vehicle was killed - at least those who could be found.

That includes Sarah and Jen Hart, both 38. They were found in the wreckage of the SUV.

Markis Hart, 19, Jeremiah Hart, 14, and Abigail Hart, 14, were thrown free of the vehicle but were found nearby.

The remains of Cierra Hart, 12, took 12 days to find. It would be weeks before a foot eventually matched through DNA to Hannah Hart’s birth mother resulted in confirmation finally last month.

One of the children, Devonte Hart, 15, has never been located. Despite efforts in three states, investigators have found no evidence to suggest he escaped the fate of his siblings, Allman said.

Mendocino County sheriff’s Capt. Greg Van Patten said the case had generated so much speculation and heartbreak that “from our standpoint, the best thing is to have this public hearing so that everybody will have the information and the case will be completely transparent.”

Said Allman, “In my career, I’ve never had so many people ask me questions about a case. This case, this topic, comes up weekly, if not every other day, and it’s a year old. I drive by where the scene is, and I see fresh flowers there on maybe a weekly basis. I think there’s a lot of unanswered questions that I truly believe that it’s my responsibility to at least put the evidence out there and allow people to come up with an educated conclusion rather than guessing at the conclusion.”

You can reach Staff Writer Mary Callahan at 707-521-5249 or mary.callahan@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @MaryCallahanB.