Losing Grip: Author Roxanna Asgarian on the Child Welfare System
The night before we met April*—before she promised us her unborn child, before she changed her mind—she took a shower with her 11-month-old in the hotel where she was staying. Kai* was a happy baby, chubby-limbed and blue-eyed, and water made him even happier. But trying to maneuver her own eight-months-pregnant body in a slippery tile stall while holding a wet baby wasn’t easy. She lost her grip, he wriggled free, and suddenly his face was covered in blood.
She knew she needed to get him to the hospital, but she didn’t have a car. Neither did her mom, who lived nearby but was in the process of getting evicted from her apartment and would soon join April at the extended-stay hotel, with all her possessions and two big dogs.
So April called her ex—the father of Kai and the unborn baby girl she was planning to place for adoption, the guy who had once bitten her and left a thin white scar on her wrist.
When my partner and I and our six-year-old son showed up the next morning with two women from the adoption agency, Kai was bouncy and charming, with nothing but a small scab above his eyebrow to hint at what had happened. One of the agency women, who was kind and experienced but not a social worker, said, “You could have called me. I would have given you a ride.”
Trailing behind every story is a ghost road of what-ifs. What if April’s ex hadn’t been in a generous mood that night? What if the hospital staff had seen a pregnant 19-year-old with a bloody baby and a story about slipping in the shower and called the Department of Children and Family Services? What if they decided Kai wasn’t safe in her care? Would a social worker have warned April that having an open case was a bad look, and further pressured her to place her unborn baby for adoption? Or would a social worker have hooked her into all the services that the adoption agency was currently plugging her into, getting her the help she needed and deserved, without having to promise her baby to anyone?
What if April hadn’t been white?
Roxanna Asgarian writes about the domino effect of child removal and the foster care system in We Were Once a Family, an obsessively documented, devastating, riveting book that uses as its case study a case you may have heard about: In 2018, two white adoptive mothers, Jen and Sarah Hart, drugged their six adopted Black and biracial children, and drove their SUV off a cliff.
I’m not alone in being haunted by the story, which has been widely covered in the media and a podcast. As a queer white mom via transracial adoption, perhaps I’m a little extra haunted. I’ve wondered about Jen and Sarah’s motivations, but I have also wondered about what happened before Jen and Sarah came along. Maybe because I’ve worked with kids who live in group homes and parents who are trying to get their kids back. Maybe because of April.
Scouring case files and public records, and interviewing rightfully wary family members over a period of years, Roxanna depicts two families, the Davises and the Scheuriches, who were troubled, but not abusive or neglectful. In a better universe, the Davis children would be alive and living with the aunt who tried to adopt them, regularly seeing the older brother who dreamed of finding them, and Tammy Scheurich’s children would still be in her care.
Roxanna doesn’t villainize Jen and Sarah or their families; villainizing is a form of elevation, in a way. Her conversations with Jen’s dad are as poignant and painful as those with the children’s biological families. Instead, she asks readers to remove their gaze from the individual horrors inflicted by two white women, and to focus instead on the systemic issues that have left a far wider swath of victims.
In a Q&A with MUTHA, she describes how she set out to restore dignity to two families who had been stripped of almost everything.
Cheryl Klein: You had already been reporting on the child welfare system when you started looking into the stories behind the murders. What surprised you in your research? Did (or how did) the project change your own beliefs about the system?
Roxanna Asgarian: The thing that stood out most to me as I was reporting this story was the total lack of dignity shown to the birth families, including the older Davis brother, Dontay, in the wake of the children’s murders and long before that, when the children were first removed from their homes. My work on the system up to that point had largely centered on children in foster care, and it was eye opening to see the power dynamics at play when courts remove children from their parents and terminate parental rights.
Dontay Davis, the older brother of Devonte, Jeremiah, and Ciera, is a particularly heartbreaking figure. It’s so clear how much he loves his siblings and his own children, but his behavioral responses to trauma—and the systemic responses to those responses—create a devastating cycle. How did you approach portraying him?
Getting to know Dontay was a long and slow process. He shared his foster care file with me, and I was reading through the 4,000 pages of it as I was getting to know him face to face. That helped me understand that his mistrust of systems, and of people like me who claimed to want to help, had its roots in the many, many times his trust was violated while he was in the foster care system. I think that people handle trauma very differently, and I think a lot of people handle it like Dontay, with anger, with nihilism. It felt important to convey how that deep and unhealed trauma was impacting his girlfriend, his dad Nathaniel, and his son.
This is a story about, among other things, who in America gets the benefit of the doubt. Throughout the book, there are examples of social workers who paint the Hart parents in a glowing light, and scrutinize the children’s biological families. It’s clear that the problems are systemic, but what can individuals inside and outside the system do to alter these biases?
For me, this story shows the two tracks that racism operates through: The systems are clearly biased, as we plainly see in the data about disproportionality, and about how much worse Black and Indigenous children fare in the foster system than their peers. But we also see in the Hart story just how many individual acts of bias contributed to these kids’ deaths — from the doctor who didn’t recommend removing the children from the Harts after he saw five out of the six of them were so small they weren’t even on the growth charts for their ages, to Tammy’s caseworker who says she still doesn’t believe the Hart women could have murdered their kids, despite the mountain of evidence that they did. Individuals, especially those tasked with making these extremely consequential decisions, have to interrogate their own racism and bias.
Media coverage and social media discourse have sometimes pitted adoption against family preservation. (As something of an aside, I’m an adoptive parent myself, and if anything, my experience gave me more empathy for the kids’ first families: I know what it’s like to submit the most personal details of my life to a social worker, and I know what it’s like to long for a child whose placement I have no control over.) But Nathaniel is a great example of a potential open adoption within a community, an arrangement that has existed informally for most of history. What opportunities do you see for foster and adoption placements to happen in a non-adversarial way?
Kinship placements—where kids are placed with relatives or other people in their lives they already know and love—are vital to a community response to child well-being. There are federal directives that these placements should receive preference, but in reality, we see families losing their children for all sorts of reasons that have more to do with housing regulations or long-ago criminal history than with whether the relative can provide love, support, and stability for the child. Relatives also, at least in Texas, receive about half of what foster parents receive [monetarily] to take care of children. This results in a de facto preference for stranger care, which is the most disruptive option for the child. Like you said, extended families have been caring for their kin forever; we need to respect their right to do so.
Over the course of your reporting, you gain family members’ trust and end up advocating for them and even bringing home some of the children’s ashes. How did you navigate journalistic objectivity (if such a thing is possible) vs. the many human needs you faced in your interactions?
I don’t believe in journalistic objectivity. I think it’s a deference to the status quo, and an adherence to “objectivity” ends up reinforcing the narrative of the people in power. Instead, I think journalists have the obligation to interrogate and critique systems of power, and to create opportunities for those who have been harmed by the powerful to be heard and understood.
How did reporting and writing this book impact you as a mother, and vice versa?
I started work on this book when my son was one year old; I was still nursing him. Being a new mother helped me understand on a visceral level the bond between parent and child. I don’t need a legal document to consider myself a mom, I am a mom. Seeing how Sherry and Tammy were treated as if their fundamental bonds to their children no longer existed — and seeing how ashamed and traumatized they were by their treatment by the state — made me committed to telling a more true story of this tragedy, one where their experiences were included.
*Names have been changed.
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