The 2018 murder-suicide of the Hart family became a national story, first because it seemed like a tragic accident, then because it was an unthinkable crime where the parents murdered their entire family. News coverage afterwards tended to focus solely on the women, asking why they had done it, with some bigoted attacks that argued against gay couples’ rights to adopt. What nearly all of the ensuing news coverage omitted was anything about the six children, all of whom were Black and came from Texas, while the mothers, both white, lived in Minnesota.

Roxanna Asgarian covered the story for The Oregonian and developed her work into the book We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America, which tells the stories of the six children before and after their adoptions, and then branches off into a broader examination of the dysfunctional child-protection systems operating in Texas and many other red states. Her efforts to know who the six children, two sets of siblings, were, and to get to know their surviving family members – including an older brother whose life has been defined and probably ruined by Texas Child Protective Services – make for an exceptional if gut-wrenching read, filled with grief and needless suffering. The second half of the book loses the narrative greed of the Harts’ story, with broader descriptions of the many failings of the foster industrial complex, including the reckless pace at which Texas separates children from their birth parents, often adopting them out of state, with the policy hitting Black families at a disproportionate level. Asgarian’s arguments are convincing, but her strength is in the human stories that fill the first half of the book.

The Harts, Jennifer and Sarah, had a checkered history even before they took in the first trio of children; they’d fostered a teenaged girl before, but a bizarre incident at a Green Bay Packers game led them to lie about the girl and kick her out. They adopted three siblings from Texas after the mother relinquished her parental rights following multiple arrests for cocaine usage and her violation of an order not to contact her children. Those three children were already showing some signs of neglect and abuse when the Harts rushed to adopt three more children, all half-siblings. Minnesota investigated them after a teacher reported possible abuse of Hannah, one of the children, but the Harts managed to talk their way out of it – the educated white women having their word accepted over that of a Black child – and then decamped for the west coast, first Oregon, and, when Oregon authorities came calling, to Washington. It appears that another possible investigation was the provocation for the women, particularly Jen, to decide to kill the entirely family, rather than face prosecution for the way they starved and abused the children.

These kids were deprived of their shot at a normal life by a Texas justice system that was already stacked against Black families, and that pursued a policy of pursuing potential adoptions simultaneous with efforts by the parents to meet criteria to reunite with their children. The parents in this case had the misfortune to run into a corrupt, racist judge named Pat Shelton, who later earned some notoriety when he helped his daughter escape serious charges for an accident where she was driving drunk at age 19 that killed her passenger; she somehow also got credit for finishing her community service hours while still in prison. The Houston Chronicle referred to his courtroom as “running a kind of adoption express,” and he also operated a crony system that rewarded lawyer friends of his who didn’t talk back or fight his wishes in court. It’s emblematic of the approach in Texas that sees taking children away from their birth parents and giving them to adoptive parents as the solution to a problem. Once the kids are with their new families, they’re off the books, so to speak. There’s little or no follow-up, and often those kids get trafficked out of state where the birth parents can’t even see them, let alone work to regain any parental rights. Asgarian doesn’t draw the comparison, but it’s analogous to Texas and other states claiming their abortion bans are somehow “pro-life,” when there are no life-supporting policies to help mothers and children after birth.

Asgarian avoids the salacious aspects of the murder, and is careful when discussing the fraught topic of interracial adoptions, discussing multiple evidence-based perspectives and research papers, while mentioning the imperfect parallel to the policy of removing Native American children from their homes in the U.S. and Canada until well into the 20^th century. It’s a thoughtful approach, but it also means the resulting work loses much of its humanity as soon as she leaves the stories of the children or their birth families. Some of the strongest parts of the work are with the boy who lived, Dontay, who had been separated from his three younger siblings before the Harts adopted them; Asgarian worked for months to gain enough of his trust for him to talk about his experiences in foster care and in institutions. She paints empathetic portraits of the birth mothers, especially Sherri, Dontay’s mother and the mother of the first three children the Harts adopted, and her husband Nathaniel, who comes across as something of a saint in the telling. (Another of Sherri’s sons, Devontay, was the boy who hugged a cop in the so-called “hug heard round the world” photograph during protests after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.) It’s a deep reminder that these six children died when there were people who loved them and never stopped trying to get them back; the government of Texas in particular chose to send them to a life of abuse rather than permit the possibility of reunion.

When Asgarian ties these two halves together, showing that the policies of the state of Texas began the collapse of dominoes that ended in the murders of the six children, the result is a cogent indictment of a system that purports to protect children while treating them like trash to be removed from the house, after which it’s taken away and no one ever has to see it again. It is angry, and it is infuriating, but at its best, it’s also a book of profound humanity. And maybe it’s a call to the rest of us to stop ignoring what is happening on our watch.

Next up: By the time this runs, I’ll likely have finished Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage.