Book: We Were Once a Family

You can get the book here. It was written by Roxanna Asgarian.

This is a story about the Hart family-the six children that were adopted by them, their backstory and their deaths.

“Asgarian begins with a powerfully rendered narrative of how the second set of three children the Harts adopted — Ciera, Devonte and Jeremiah — were caught up in the wheels of a Texas family court plagued by cronyism, xenophobia and a zeal for placing children anywhere but near their families. The children’s mother, Sherry Davis, was a drug user, but her partner, Nathaniel, much older and not living with Sherry, was a more-than-ideal caregiver for the children. So was the children’s aunt Priscilla, who played by the rules of the system and applied for custody. In reality, neither Nathaniel nor Priscilla had a chance: The family court judge, the larger-than-life, brash and braying Patrick Shelton, locked them both out of the process. Without them knowing it even happened, the three children were sent to Minnesota, into the hands of the Harts. A fourth brother — Sherry’s oldest son, Dontay — was left to languish in a residential program, without ever being told his three siblings had left the state.

Asgarian was so far ahead of any other reporter that she became the first to locate the family of the other set of adopted children: Abigail, Hannah and Markis. No one before Asgarian had bothered to notify their mother, Tammy Scheurich. (“I was floored when I realized she didn’t know,” Asgarian writes.) By the time Tammy first became a mother, at 18, she’d experienced enough trauma for several lifetimes: sexual abuse as a child, domestic violence, mental illness and hospitalizations; suicide attempts and homelessness would follow. The three children were taken from her during a health emergency for Hannah — which becomes a chance for Asgarian to note how hospitals serve as an arm of the child welfare complex. Tammy lived in a world where bringing a child to the hospital could result in that child never coming home. And that’s what happened. Tammy’s distrustful relationship with the hospital was interpreted by one Child Protective Services official as evidence of child neglect. A “blindsided” Tammy was then charged with child endangerment. And when she failed to pay $225 in court fees she was sent to jail for 30 days, received no mental health support and developed an abiding hatred for the caseworker who took the children away. Other family members were never considered as an option; instead Tammy’s children went to the Harts.”

‘We Were Once a Family’: A riveting indictment of the child welfare system
[The Washington Post 3/9/23 by Robert Kolker]

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