Devonte Hart's mother: tracing her life from the Midwest to her drive off the California cliff

By MOLLY YOUNG
The Oregonian | OregonLive

Jennifer Hart drove hundreds of thousands of miles with her six children in tow.

They danced in Bliss, Idaho, meditated in Zion National Park and made their own brass band in New Orleans. On their final trip, she drove the family's SUV off a jagged California cliff.

She, her wife and all six children are known or presumed dead. Police investigators called the crash intentional. The painstaking task of piecing together what happened may never lead to answers.

The reason Jen Hart drove off the cliff remains the central mystery. The Oregonian/OregonLive reviewed hundreds of documents and social media posts and traveled to South Dakota and Minnesota to interview people who knew her. The portrait that emerged is a woman who was smart, spontaneous and sometimes contradictory. But nothing in her carefully curated online life or her few friendships provided answers to what she was thinking in the days and hours before the family died.

Hart, 38, cut herself off from nearly all relatives, yet passed many facets of her Midwestern upbringing along to her children. On social media, she portrayed their lives as idyllic. That contrasted with the isolation and restrictions that some outsiders witnessed.

From age 20 on, she felt targeted, for dating and marrying a woman, for adopting six children of color and for speaking out on their behalf. The family gained sudden visibility in 2014, when a photo of their middle son Devonte hugging a white Portland police officer grabbed worldwide attention. Jen Hart later both reveled in and decried the overwhelming response. During the last 16 months of her life, her sunny outlook darkened. She at times felt anxious and traumatized, text messages and Facebook posts show.

She told a friend that people stalked the family's home in West Linn and stuffed threatening things in their mailbox after the 2016 presidential election. Neither she nor anyone else, however, reported anything to police.

"Jen, no matter how much people loved her, always felt very isolated and alone," said Nusheen Bakhtiar, a close friend of Hart's since 2013.

Hart texted Bakhtiar that she'd found some peace at her new home in Woodland, Washington. The family moved to a home on two acres of land in May 2017.

Bakhtiar is torn over what may have happened. Tests showed Jen Hart's blood alcohol level was above the legal limit. Her wife Sarah and two of the children had high amounts of Benadryl in their system.

Why, Bakhtiar wonders, did the tests turn up any alcohol? Jen Hart never drank.

Hart's father, from whom she was distant, believes something went terribly wrong.

"I will never ever, ever, ever, ever believe my daughter would do such a thing," Douglas Hart said. "I just don't believe she would take her own life or her spouse's life or her six children's lives."

Her mother declined comment. Her maternal aunt, Georgene Wilson-Becker, who remained in sporadic touch with Jen, said the family has agreed not to speak publicly until officials find the two children, including Devonte, who are still missing.

"Now is not the time."

Jennifer Jean Hart grew up with her parents and two brothers in Huron, a town of 13,000 in the eastern South Dakota plains.

She would pile into a wagon with her brother Jonathan and the family's rabbits. Her dad pulled the crew around the neighborhood. Eventually, Douglas Hart recalls, Jen started riding her bike alongside the wagon to make room for her youngest brother, Christopher.

The siblings, each four years apart, were talented artists and musicians. Jen played the trumpet at church Christmas services. She defied barriers, playing boys baseball rather than girls softball.

When she was 12, her parents divorced. She stayed with her mom and siblings in the blue house where she grew up.

Her dad moved across town. He was usually gone during the week for his job with the federal Western Area Power Administration. The kids visited on weekends.

When Jennifer asked to move in at 14, he drove home from work sites every day, sometimes hundreds of miles. The arrangement worked for a while, he said. But Jennifer started breaking the rules in the hours between school and his arrival home. He told her she had to move back to her mother's house.

"I thought maybe when she got older she would understand," he said.

He keeps an album with snapshots of her life. Her graduation announcement, Huron Tigers Class of 1997, is taped inside.

She enrolled in Augustana University, a Lutheran school in Sioux Falls. She was not raised in the faith but sought it out and was baptized, her dad said.

In 1999, she transferred to Northern State University, three hours away in Aberdeen.

Her name appears in the 2000 yearbook on the same page as another transfer student: Sarah Gengler.

Hart and Gengler started dating soon after Hart arrived on the red-brick campus.

Gengler was a resident assistant from Big Stone City, a small town east of the school. She eventually moved out of campus housing and into an apartment with Hart. Both studied education.

"Jen and Sarah were dramatically in love, totally, totally," Bakhtiar said.

In January 2000, Hart walked into the local Shopko and stole a pair of Nike running shoes and 25 packs of sports trading cards.

She told police she had no idea why. "Hart also told me that there has been a lot happening lately that could have caused her to do it," a police report said. It doesn't explain what she meant. She pleaded guilty to petty theft.

She stayed in school but left before graduating in 2002 when Gengler earned her degree.

By then, Hart had stopped speaking with her father. Douglas Hart said they had a disagreement in 2001. He said the issue was not her relationship with a woman, which he said she never disclosed to him. He said he did not imagine she would sever contact forever.

Over the years, he heard updates through her brothers. He couldn't imagine how hard it must be to raise six kids. He hoped she would reach out in time.

"There was issues but there is no perfect family out there," he said. "I don't believe Jennifer hated me."

Hart and Gengler formed their family in Alexandria, Minnesota, a Scandinavian town surrounded by lakes. They bought a two-story house near a busy street that leads past the mall where they worked. Gengler took Hart's name.

They fostered a teenager. The woman told the Seattle Times she was pushed out as the couple adopted their first three children: Markis, 8, Hannah, 4, and Abigail, 2.

Devonte, 5, Jeremiah, 4 and Sierra, 2, completed the family two years later in 2008.

From then on, Jen Hart chronicled their life on Facebook. She took care of the children while Sarah Hart worked. She taught the kids to play trumpet and learned to cut their hair. When the Green Bay Packers made it to the Super Bowl, she buzzed a "G" into Devonte's hair. He wanted "SF" two years later for the San Francisco 49ers, she wrote.

She loved animals, the outdoors, sports and '80s pop culture and made sure all the children did too. She spent months in 2015 making costumes to mark the 30th anniversary of The Goonies, a movie she memorized with her dad and brothers.

She cheered the accomplishments of every child. Markis excelled at a geography bee. Hannah and Jeremiah recited the Greek alphabet. Jeremiah and Abbi taught a kindergarten song to their younger sister Sierra. Devonte came home with a worksheet that listed his classmates' compliments, his proud mother wrote.

"He is a really great friend," one student told the teacher. "He helps people if they get hurt."

But eventually, Jen Hart did not view school as a safe place for him or his brothers. She said they were discriminated against because of their race and parents. Devonte faced the “worst of the worst,” she wrote in April 2010.

"Physical attacks, death threats, name calling … and so much more on a daily basis."

They felt discriminated at home, too. More than 30 calls to police involved a feud with a single neighbor, records show. The man admitted in June 2009 that "he had made some comments about the Harts' sexuality." The police chief brokered peace between the Harts and the man.

"It might not be 100 percent perfect, but will head in the direction of being helpful," Chief Rick Wyffels wrote in his report.

The family didn't plan to stay long. Jen Hart wrote in November 2010 that they contacted a real estate agent to sell their house and move.

Her post appeared four days after Sarah Hart was arrested for child abuse.

When 6-year-old Abbi showed up at school with bruises, she told her teacher that her mom Jen had hit her.

Hannah had given a teacher a similar report two years prior.

But Sarah Hart told police that she was the one who spanked Abbi. The case ended with a guilty plea in April 2011. The couple pulled the children out of school days later.

Jen Hart never mentioned the case on her Facebook page or disclosed that she started homeschooling. Instead, she posted a picture that fall of the six children sitting among leaves, captioned "science class in the forest."

The family’s treks to nature sometimes lasted a day or a month. The “wandering H(e)arts” logged thousands of miles, according to Jen Hart’s social media posts. She wrote that Sarah Hart often stayed behind to work and caught up with the family when she could.

She said the whole family traveled to Connecticut, where Jen and Sarah Hart married after 10 years together.

They also went to music festivals and gatherings, collecting a network of friends that once threw a party for Devonte and continually showered Jen Hart's Facebook page with "likes." Devonte stood out. He almost always wore a free hug sign and a zebra bodysuit. Jen Hart wrote more about him than any other child.

"I felt more connected to this little boy … more than I had ever felt to anyone in my life," she wrote on his 10th birthday in 2012.

Sarah Hart moved to the Portland area that fall for a job. Jen Hart stayed behind with the children for six months until the family's house sold. Within days of their arrival in Portland in April 2013, an Oregonian/OregonLive photographer snapped a photo of Devonte dancing. Jen Hart shared the photo on Facebook.

"His first Saturday Market: Ends up in the Portland newspaper," she wrote. "This kid. His dancing. His smile and Free Hugs. His Love of life. Contagious."

Bakhtiar said she connected instantly with Jen Hart when they met at a charity concert in November 2013. They bonded over music and their sense of humor.

"Jen was the most sensitive, gentle, humane person," she said.

Bakhtiar visited the family's home in West Linn a handful of times, she said. She would not see or interact with all the kids, usually just Devonte and Jeremiah. The rest would have their heads buried in books, she said. She remembers Abbi as outgoing, Markis as shy and Sierra as giggly.

She said she never heard Hannah speak.

She attended a Bernie Sanders rally with the family in 2016. The risers didn't have enough space, so she offered to let Hannah sit on her lap. She thought the girl was 7 or 8.

"You know she's 14, right?" Bakhtiar recalled Jen Hart saying.

Over time, Bakhtiar said Hart confided in her about the struggles of raising six kids. How they had to leave school because teachers punished them more severely than classmates. How each child was born addicted to drugs or alcohol and faced their own set of problems. How the children gorged themselves on food because they did not know better.

Hart said the children's genetics and rough starts in life explained their size and behaviors. She said she did not want to go into details out of respect for the children's birth parents, Bakhtiar said.

Hart told Bakhtiar the children could never be left alone.

She told her Markis, the oldest, could never work.

Neither would any of the other children. Or have wives. Or kids.

She remembers Hart specifically said: "They would never grow up to have normal lives."

The curated life Jen Hart presented on social media contains elements that appear unreal or overstated. The only people who probably knew the truth are dead.  

Understandably, there are also omissions. Her posts did not slow when the family was investigated for child abuse or neglect: in 2008, 2010 and 2013, the final time in Oregon.

One thread that tied the accusations together were claims Jen Hart withheld food from her children as punishment. Yet in photos posted over nearly a decade, she showed the children posed next to bountiful displays of vegetables, veggie burgers, blackberries and chocolate cream pie.

She also wrote more than once about the abusive world that her children had left behind. She described Devonte's birth and early childhood in 2012. "Born into a world of drugs (pumping through his newly born body), weapons and extreme poverty, one would assume his future was bleak. ... By the time he was 4, he had smoked, consumed alcohol, handled guns, been shot at and suffered severe abuse and neglect."

Devonte's parents lost rights to the boy and his siblings, and an aunt tried to adopt the children while they were in foster care. The family came forward after the crash.

Attorney Shonda Jones, who represented the aunt, said Hart's account was false. "Those are all lies, that did not happen. Devonte was not born on drugs. I've never heard anything about being shot at or anything like that."

But a blogger noticed Jen Hart's online claims about her child's horrific start in life in 2014 and incredible turnaround. She published it in a New Zealand outlet, then Huffington Post, all before his hug photo went viral.

"The adoptive mother fed a lie to the public," Jones said. "She fed into a stereotype that reinforced other people's racism."

When a publication posted his photo, Jen Hart remarked on about Devonte's fame. But she often replied to friends on Facebook that the family did not want attention. In a text message to Bakhtiar last fall, she said she turned down offers for "everything imaginable."  

After the photo of Devonte and the police officer went viral, she said reporters staked out the family home for weeks. Their mailbox filled with positive messages from people worldwide, she wrote on Facebook. "Kim Kardashian = #breaktheinternet. Devonte Hart = #healtheinternet," she wrote.

Her positivity dimmed in 2016, after the Pulse nightclub shootings in Orlando and the election of Donald Trump, events discussed frequently online. She wrote often that year about Black Lives Matter and said a man had called Devonte a racial slur in downtown Portland.

"I've been struggling with the colorblindness I'm surrounded by in my circle(s) of friends. My children are black."

"There are so few people in my life that I feel really GET it," she said. "Love and light seem to be the only things in the tool box. That's not being an ally for black lives."

Sierra, Jeremiah, Abigail, Devonte, Hannah and Markis Hart smile on a the family adventure to San Francisco.

She attended two post-election rallies with her children and said people responded with questions about why she would put her kids in danger.

Soon after, she disappeared from Facebook for six months. She changed her phone. The family moved to Washington.

She told Bakhtiar that she had been stalked, harassed and threatened. She described that period as the toughest in her life. The couple called police frequently to report matters such as loud sounds and loose dogs while they lived in Alexandria, but West Linn police have no record of responding to any calls from the Harts.

Jen Hart told Bakhtiar via text that she cut out nearly all people from her life and struggled with anxiety over the threats she faced. "It's motivated by racists/bigoted reasons," she wrote. "Not ever feeling safe is a pretty shitty thing."

Bakhtiar's phone shows she contacted Hart at least six times asking to see her and the family.

She never was invited.

The last two times she texted her friend, Jen Hart did not respond.

Everton Bailey Jr. and Shane Dixon Kavanaugh of The Oregonian/OregonLive and freelance journalist Roxanna Asgarian contributed to this report.

-- Molly Young

myoung@oregonian.com

@mollykyoung