We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America
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Roxanna Asgarian. (2023). We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Roxanna Asgarian. 2023. We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Roxanna Asgarian, We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.

Roxanna Asgarian. We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.

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We Were Once a Family

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We Were Once a Family A Story of Love Death and Child Removal in America

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A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America

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   • fileAs: Asgarian, Roxanna
   • bioText: Roxanna Asgarian is a Texas-based independent journalist who writes about child welfare and the law. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, New York, and Texas Monthly, among other publications. She received the 2022 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award for We Were Once a Family.
   • name: Roxanna Asgarian

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We Were Once a Family

fullDescription

Winner of the 2023 National Book Critics Circle for Nonfiction and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize

A Washington Post best nonfiction book of 2023 | Winner of the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction

"A riveting indictment of the child welfare system . . . [A] bracing gut punch of a book." —Robert Kolker, The Washington Post
"[A] moving and superbly reported book." —Jessica Winter, The New Yorker
"A harrowing account . . . [and] a powerful critique of [the] foster care system . . . We Were Once a Family is a wrenching book." —Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice | One of Publishers Weekly's best nonfiction books of 2023
The shocking, deeply reported story of a murder-suicide that claimed the lives of six children—and a searing indictment of the American foster care system.
On March 26, 2018, rescue workers discovered a crumpled SUV and the bodies of two women and multiple children at the bottom of a cliff along the Pacific Coast Highway. Investigators soon concluded that the crash was a murder-suicide, but there was more to the story: Jennifer and Sarah Hart, it turned out, were a white married couple who had adopted six Black children from two different Texas families in 2006 and 2008. Behind the family's loving facade was an alleged pattern of abuse and neglect that had been ignored as the couple withdrew the children from school and moved west. It soon became apparent that the State of Texas knew all too little about the two individuals to whom it had given custody of six children.
Immersive journalism of the highest order, Roxanna Asgarian's We Were Once a Family is a revelation of precarious lives; it is also a shattering exposé of the foster care and adoption systems that produced this tragedy. As a journalist in Houston, Asgarian sought out the children's birth families and put them at the center of the story. We follow the lives of the Harts' adopted children and their birth parents, and the machinations of the state agency that sent the children far away. Asgarian's reporting uncovers persistent racial biases and corruption as young people of color are separated from birth parents without proper cause. The result is a riveting narrative and a deeply reported indictment of a system that continues to fail America's most vulnerable children while upending the lives of their families.

reviews

1. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from January 9, 2023
     Journalist Asgarian debuts with a comprehensive and searing look at systemic issues within the foster care and adoption systems through the eyes of two Texas families whose Black and biracial children were removed from their homes, adopted, abused, and killed in a deliberate murder-suicide car crash by their white adoptive mothers in 2018. Over and over, Asgarian finds that wherever the children’s birth relatives “encountered resistance in the system,” the adoptive parents were given the benefit of the doubt, despite evidence of long-term abuse. Instead of focusing—as most contemporaneous news reports did—on the “dark psychological problems” of the adoptive married couple, Jennifer and Sarah Hart, Asgarian centers the birth families, interviewing the birth mothers whose parental rights were terminated and extended family members who had been seeking custody of the children, and describing the lingering trauma of the children’s surviving family, including the siblings who weren’t adopted. Emotional and frequently enraging, it adds up to a blistering indictment of a system where, in the words of one reform advocate, “we’ve lost key concepts like humanity, dignity. We’re prioritizing compliance and the needs of bureaucracy.” Throughout, Asgarian makes clear that the endemic failures that led to this shocking tragedy continue to affect countless families caught up in the child welfare system. Sensitive, impassioned, and eye-opening, this is a must-read.

2. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     February 15, 2023
     A searching examination of a foster-care system that harms children more than it helps. Asgarian, who covers the courts and the law for the Texas Tribune, takes as her point of departure a story from 2018, when six adopted children and their adoptive parents died after those parents, fleeing child-abuse investigations, drove over a cliff into the Pacific Ocean. The story made the news for all the usual sensational reasons, not least that one of the children had become a social media meme with a photograph that showed him hugging a police officer during an anti-racism protest. Look closely at that photograph, notes the author, and it's clear that the child is begging for help. "The reality was that the children had not been okay," she writes. "They had not been cared for. They suffered, and then they died. They were murdered." The children were all Black, with adoptive White parents who'd been gaming the system to earn income as providers while keeping them half-starved. Asgarian deepens the story with an examination of the trajectory of an older sibling who had aged out of the foster system and been placed in a residential treatment center. As the author notes, that is all too often a direct path to prison. It certainly was in the case of the young man, who years later may have his own child separated from the family and placed in foster care. Asgarian clearly shows how the dysfunctional system hinges on racist assumptions, including that "these six Black children must be better off with the white women who adopted them" than with their Black birthparents or relatives, even though responsible relatives were available and willing to help. Asgarian closes by pointing out how the approach that punishes needy families instead of working to improve their conditions "does nothing to help the children," and she is entirely convincing in that conclusion. A sobering call to action demanding reform of the child-protective and foster-care regimes.

     COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

3. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from February 1, 2023
     In March of 2018, two women deliberately drove themselves and their six children off a cliff into the Pacific Ocean. Details about the family slowly emerged, including allegations of abuse and neglect, but while there was considerable speculation about the parents, who were married and both white, the media paid little attention to the six Black children, who had been adopted from two different families. Author and investigative reporter Asgarian spent five years getting to know the birth families of these young victims, and her work uncovers a devastating web of intergenerational poverty, drug use, violence, and wrenching separations as well as a bleak indictment of the foster care system. Asgarian describes how she tracked down relatives, in almost every instance having to inform them of their family members' death in the crash. This personal narrative twines around a history of the arbitrary, woefully inadequate legislation and funding at both state and federal levels accorded to orphaned and foster children in the U.S. What happened to these kids is a tragedy, and the ongoing failings of the foster system are insupportable. News of the shocking story garnered substantial attention, so expect considerable interest in Asgarian's thoroughly researched and revelatory retelling.

     COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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shortDescription

Winner of the 2023 National Book Critics Circle for Nonfiction and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize

A Washington Post best nonfiction book of 2023 | Winner of the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction

"A riveting indictment of the child welfare system . . . [A] bracing gut punch of a book." —Robert Kolker, The Washington Post
"[A] moving and superbly reported book." —Jessica Winter, The New Yorker
"A harrowing account . . . [and] a powerful critique of [the] foster care system . . . We Were Once a Family is a wrenching book." —Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice | One of Publishers Weekly's best nonfiction books of 2023
The shocking, deeply reported story of a murder-suicide that claimed the lives of six children—and a searing indictment of the American foster care system.
On March 26,...

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We Were Once a Family A Story of Love Death and Child Removal in America

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awards

1. • source: The National Book Critics Circle
   • value: National Book Critics Circle Award

subtitle

A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America

publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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1. • code: FAM001010
   • description: Family & Relationships / Abuse / Child Abuse
2. • code: LAW038010
   • description: Law / Family Law / Children
3. • code: TRU002000
   • description: True Crime / Murder / General