Hart family investigation still ongoing

There may never be real closure for those who knew Sarah and Jennifer Hart and the six children who joined their family long ago.

But nearly seven months after a deadly crash on the Mendocino coast offered a glimpse into their troubled lives, authorities around the region continue to work to tie up loose ends and bring finality to the tragic case, a Mendocino County sheriff’s official said Friday.

Multiple agencies are involved, and they’re pulling together threads not only from the crash site near Westport, but from lab results, cellphone data and searches of the Washington state home where the two adoptive mothers lived for 10 months before questions about the treatment of their children prompted the family to pack up and leave.

What happened next is the stuff of nightmares.

Investigators said preliminary evidence suggests Jennifer Hart intentionally drove her sport utility vehicle off a 100-foot cliff at a Highway 1 turnout near Westport, killing her family. Hart, 38, was legally drunk at the time of the crash. Lab results turned up evidence her wife and at least two of the three children had ingested sedatives. None wore seat belts.

But the investigation remains incomplete, divided between the county coroner’s office, the CHP, the FBI and the Clark County Sheriff’s Office in Washington, Mendocino County Sheriff’s Lt. Shannon Barney said.

Once it’s done, he said, he wants the public to be able to see the evidence for themselves, though much already has been revealed.

“What we’re trying to do is bring those investigations to a conclusion,” Barney said, “and then we’re looking at, ‘How do we present this case to the public, so that we can be transparent?’?”

The current focus for ?Barney’s office is the identification of partial remains found washed ashore in May, about six weeks after the family’s eight-seat GMC Yukon XL was found overturned in the surf at the bottom of a cliff.

The two parents and three of their six adopted children - Markis, 19, and Jeremiah and Abigail Hart, both 14 - were discovered March 26 inside the sport utility vehicle, all dead.

The body of another sister, Ciera Hart, 12, was found in coastal waters April 7 and identified using DNA, Barney said.

A month later came the grim discovery of a skeletal foot, still in a girl’s shoe and tangled in ripped jeans washed ashore at Hardy Creek, about a mile north of the crash site. It is believed to belong to Hannah Hart, 16, one of two children otherwise unaccounted for.

Still missing is Devonte Hart, 15, who is presumed dead. But the girl’s remains have not yet been positively identified, Barney said.

Though Jennifer and Sarah Hart adopted two sets of biological siblings, testing comparing DNA from the Hardy Creek remains and that of Markis and Abigail Hart was inconclusive, Barney said. Efforts to locate another direct relation foundered long enough that authorities were preparing to petition a Texas court to unseal Hannah Hart’s adoption records so they could track down her natural parents for DNA samples, he said.

But before they could, a woman came forward last week saying she was Hannah Hart’s mother and had only just learned of the fate of the three children, Barney said. He declined to identify her or say where she lived.

Local authorities are now working with law enforcement officials to facilitate acquisition of a DNA swab that can be shipped to Mendocino County for comparison, he said.

The Hart family case stirred grief around the nation, as well as questions about what might have been done to save the children, given many red flags visible throughout the family’s history.

Accounts from friends and public records show it was part of a pattern of coming and going, punctuated by child welfare investigations, first in rural Minnesota, where the Harts adopted two sets of children out of the Texas state foster system in 2006 and 2009, and then in West Linn, Oregon, their home for ?five years.

They had lived in Woodland, Washington, only a few months when Hannah jumped out a second-floor window and came to a neighbor’s home seeking rescue from her mothers. Last March, her brother, Devonte, repeatedly asked the neighbors for food, prompting them to call social services officials.

One knocked on their door March 23. By the next morning, they had gone.

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