Speaker 1: This past. Can I help you? Who are we checking on?
Speaker 1: The mothers are Sarah and Jennifer Hart and according to
Speaker 1: my intake, they have six children in the home. Six
Speaker 1: children okay, the eldest being nineteen, so not technically legally
Speaker 1: a child. Okay. The children are in Ragne between nineteen
Speaker 1: and twelve according to my intake. Okay. And are you
Speaker 1: with CPS or you are the concern c with CPS
Speaker 1: in Callot's County, Yes, ma'am, okay, let's see here the
Speaker 1: home Monday and Friday. I knocked on the door just
Speaker 1: this morning and no one I can get in a response.
Speaker 1: Are you there now? No, unfortunately, and you've tried two
Speaker 1: times and you can't reach them. Correct. I've knocked on
Speaker 1: the door twice. Different cars have been moving in and
Speaker 1: now I noticed, so I feel like someone's there. Okay.
Speaker 1: And when were you there last? This morning and thirty Okay.
Speaker 1: I've got a deputy on the way and he will
Speaker 1: call you back when he I have something to tell you. Okay,
Speaker 1: thank you so much to appreciate your alrighty today. Thanks
Speaker 1: a good dame. Bye. The call you just heard came
Speaker 1: in the day the hearts died. You can hear the
Speaker 1: operator speaking with a case worker from Clark County Social
Speaker 1: Services requesting a wellness check at the Heart family's home
Speaker 1: in Woodland, Washington. The case worker was responding to a
Speaker 1: call from Dana to Kalb, who lived next door with
Speaker 1: her husband Bruce and shared a driveway with the Hearts.
Speaker 1: She wasn't the first person to report the Hearts to
Speaker 1: the authorities. You may recall that her own dad had
Speaker 1: reported them four months earlier. Hi, how can I help you? Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's some kids that I feel as being highly abused
Speaker 1: in Woodland, Washington and basically my southern laws, like most people,
Speaker 1: they don't want to get involved, and so he was
Speaker 1: keeping my daughter out of it. But since you told
Speaker 1: me about it, I just can't live with it. I'm
Speaker 1: very concerned for these kids. So how did these women, adventurous,
Speaker 1: tree hugging, free spirited peace necks as Jed called them
Speaker 1: on Facebook go from being groovy, idealistic trailblazers to moms
Speaker 1: who abused their kids and drove off a cliff? And
Speaker 1: when did the abuse begin? From glamour and how stuff works?
Speaker 1: This is broken Hearts. I'm Lizzie Agan and I'm Justine Harmon.
Speaker 1: Here's Lauren Smiley talking with Amy Olstad Rstad, whose son
Speaker 1: went to Woodland Elementary School with the Hearts. Describe what
Speaker 1: you did see when they were there going to the
Speaker 1: same school as your kids. Just kind of walk me
Speaker 1: through what you knew about the Hearts. They just caught
Speaker 1: your eye. I can't It's like something you can't really.
Speaker 1: They had an aur of you know, just saying these
Speaker 1: five and I only saw five of them because Marcuts
Speaker 1: must have been at the middle school by them. I
Speaker 1: can remember them all getting out and standing in a line,
Speaker 1: and us waiting until they were all out in this line,
Speaker 1: and then they would just walk right in, just like
Speaker 1: little soldiers. And you know, we thought it was. My
Speaker 1: husband and I would talk about it and say, well,
Speaker 1: I guess you know their well behave. We thought they
Speaker 1: were all the same age. That's one thing that I
Speaker 1: do remember is, you know, our son was in kindergarten then,
Speaker 1: and we thought they were small, so we thought they
Speaker 1: had to be in kindergarten. The kids Amy saw from
Speaker 1: her car window were the Hearts, Abigail, Hannah, Davante, Jeremiah,
Speaker 1: and Sierra. The woman dropping them off would have been Jen.
Speaker 1: At this point, Sarah was working full time at her
Speaker 1: Burger's while Jen stayed home with the kids. If you've
Speaker 1: ever done school drop off, you know the scene, big backpacks,
Speaker 1: shuffling sneakers, maybe a little sister waving from the back seat.
Speaker 1: For lots of kids, the next seven hours are a
Speaker 1: drudgery to be endured. For the hearts, the school day
Speaker 1: might have been a welcome respite from what was going
Speaker 1: on at home. The abuse started in Alexandria, Minnesota, and
Speaker 1: it would follow the family across three states. We'll never
Speaker 1: know why Jen and Sarah moved so many times, but
Speaker 1: wherever they went, people noticed their kids odd robotic behavior,
Speaker 1: their bruises, their hunger. Here's Ian Spurling, Jen and Sarah's
Speaker 1: friend who you've heard from before. Looking back on it,
Speaker 1: it doesn't look like they were normal kids. They didn't
Speaker 1: really have friends. They didn't hang out with other kids
Speaker 1: any That's one of those red flags when I had
Speaker 1: stated that in my post, like duh, that's one of
Speaker 1: the other things looking back, like, why didn't we notice
Speaker 1: they didn't have like friends? You know, the kids weren't
Speaker 1: allowed to just go hang out with friends. The paper
Speaker 1: trail starts. On September nine, two eight. According to a
Speaker 1: police report, someone on the staff at Washington Elementary School
Speaker 1: noticed a suspicious bruise on Hannah Hart's arm. She was six,
Speaker 1: and this was her second week of first grade. Did
Speaker 1: a teacher see it first? A cafeteria aid is school nurse.
Speaker 1: According to a police report, Hannah told someone at school
Speaker 1: that her mother had struck her with a belt. Davante
Speaker 1: was nearly six too, most likely adjusting to life in
Speaker 1: a different kindergarten class. Marcus was somewhere else in the
Speaker 1: same building. He was ten. Did Hannah tell her brothers
Speaker 1: what had happened while they waited for Jen to come
Speaker 1: pick them up after school? Here's what we know. When
Speaker 1: Sarah and Jen were questioned, they told the police that
Speaker 1: the bruise on Hannah's arm was probably from a fall
Speaker 1: down stairs. Eight stairs to be exact, which is an
Speaker 1: odd detail to have on the tip of your tongue.
Speaker 1: I've walked from the first floor of my house to
Speaker 1: the second one at least a thousand times over the
Speaker 1: thirteen years we've lived there, and I couldn't tell you
Speaker 1: how many stairs there are. Two months later, a week
Speaker 1: before Thanksgiving, break Jen and Sarah Withdrew, Hannah, Davante, and
Speaker 1: Marcus from Washington Elementary School to be homeschooled. This must
Speaker 1: have been a terrifying moment for the kids, relinquishing their
Speaker 1: cubbies and their spots on the rug. What was running
Speaker 1: through their minds when they left the classrooms that day
Speaker 1: was Marcus, who was in the fifth grade, relieved to
Speaker 1: be sprung from the looming specter of long division. Were
Speaker 1: they dreading being stuck in the house all day with Jen?
Speaker 1: Jen painted a colorful picture of homeschooling on Facebook. Lessons
Speaker 1: on the beach, meditation on the deck, our class on
Speaker 1: the dining room table. But who knows how long the
Speaker 1: days were for her six students and how much they
Speaker 1: might have missed having classmates who weren't their siblings and
Speaker 1: a teacher who wasn't their mom. In September two thousand nine,
Speaker 1: the Heart family took a road trip so Jen and
Speaker 1: Sarah could get married in a civil ceremony in Connecticut,
Speaker 1: where same sex marriage was legal. For the next nine years,
Speaker 1: Jen would mark their anniversaries on Facebook, showing the two
Speaker 1: of them in front of a waterfall or a thicket
Speaker 1: of evergreens. Alongside a flowery ode to her bride, who,
Speaker 1: by all accounts, was not a regular user of social media.
Speaker 1: When we were finally able to get married, Jen wrote
Speaker 1: in two thousand seventeen, the only people present were our children,
Speaker 1: simply because our support system was so small. That same fall,
Speaker 1: all five school aged Chart kids were re enrolled in
Speaker 1: public school. Later, Jen and Sarah would tell a social
Speaker 1: worker that this was a requirement of their adoption agency,
Speaker 1: So off the older five went. Marcus, Hannah Davante, Abigail,
Speaker 1: and Jeremiah Sierra stayed home with Jen. You beautiful thing you,
Speaker 1: Jen wrote about her on Facebook, according to a police report.
Speaker 1: In November of two thousand ten, Douglas County Social Services
Speaker 1: got another call from school. This time the subject was Abigail,
Speaker 1: who was in the first grade. She'd been stealing classmates
Speaker 1: food and digging through the garbage looking for scraps. Later
Speaker 1: that month, Abigail reported AOIS to her teacher. According to
Speaker 1: a report compiled three years later by the Oregon Department
Speaker 1: of Health and Human Service is and I'm quoting here,
Speaker 1: Abigail had bruising on her stomach area from her stern
Speaker 1: um to waistband and bruising on her back from mid
Speaker 1: back to upper buttocks reportedly caused by Jen Hart according
Speaker 1: to Abigail, but in the CPS interview with the couple,
Speaker 1: Sarah Hart said she was the one responsible for the marks.
Speaker 1: The worker said this incident was over a penny. They
Speaker 1: had discovered a penny in Abigail's pocket and asked her
Speaker 1: about it. Abigail had said she found it. Jen and
Speaker 1: Sarah Hart did not believe her and said she stole
Speaker 1: a penny and was lying about it, hence the spanking,
Speaker 1: which got out of control. Per Sarah Heart. Abigail also
Speaker 1: said they put her head under cold water and Jen
Speaker 1: had her two hands on her neck end quote. Investigators
Speaker 1: interviewed the other Heart kids, who said they were often grounded, spanked,
Speaker 1: or sent to their rooms without food, but when Jen
Speaker 1: and Sarah were questioned separately, they told a different story.
Speaker 1: Sarah said she'd been the one who had Abigail. Jen
Speaker 1: backed her up, and the investigators believed them. Maybe Jen
Speaker 1: had more to lose. She was the one who received
Speaker 1: monthly assistance checks from the state of Texas for adopting
Speaker 1: the kids out of foster care. She also received Social
Speaker 1: Security checks for Davante and Jeremiah. All of these checks
Speaker 1: were in her name, and she might have believed a
Speaker 1: child abuse conviction would put these funds in jeopardy. The
Speaker 1: case workers report said, the problem is these women look normal. Remember,
Speaker 1: Abby was the first kid Jen held in her arms,
Speaker 1: the one who made her a mom. She was the
Speaker 1: one who loved dance parties and tried to teach the
Speaker 1: chickens how to do yoga. In one of the last
Speaker 1: pictures we see of her on Facebook, she's buckled into
Speaker 1: a roller coaster at the Oregon State Fair, smiling bravely
Speaker 1: by Sarah's side. This is the girl whose neck Jen
Speaker 1: held in her hands under cold water. The state file
Speaker 1: charges against Sarah in state court for two gross misdemeanors,
Speaker 1: malicious punishment of a child and domestic assault. In December
Speaker 1: of two thousand ten, Minnesota Child Welfare learned about a
Speaker 1: bruise on Hannah's hand. By this time, she was in
Speaker 1: third grade, the year of chapter books, when you're not
Speaker 1: quite one of the big kids yet, but you know
Speaker 1: your way around the school. When she was questioned, Hannah
Speaker 1: said Jenn hit her because she lied. She said Jen
Speaker 1: hit her all the time. Later, the school nurse called
Speaker 1: the Hearts to report that Hannah was asking her classmates
Speaker 1: for food. She said she hadn't eaten all day. Sarah's
Speaker 1: response was not the one you'd expect of a mother
Speaker 1: trying to put her best foot forward for the benefit
Speaker 1: of the authorities. She said of Hannah, she's playing the
Speaker 1: food card. Just give her water. Hannah was the oldest sister,
Speaker 1: the one with the missing front teeth. There aren't many
Speaker 1: pictures of her on Facebook, but in the ones we
Speaker 1: do see, she appears shy and tentative. She was the
Speaker 1: one who would eventually jump out her bedroom window and
Speaker 1: run to the neighbors in the middle of the night
Speaker 1: to tell them her mom's were abusive, but that wouldn't
Speaker 1: happen until later, much later. Ian Sperling says he hadn't
Speaker 1: seen much of the family in the year before they died.
Speaker 1: There were canceled plans, lots of them. He's been beating
Speaker 1: himself up over some of the signs he missed. Obviously,
Speaker 1: hindsight is my wife and I are beating ourselves up
Speaker 1: daily because you know, why didn't we see this? Well,
Speaker 1: you couldn't. There's not a person I know, and even
Speaker 1: those the people that said they followed up. I get
Speaker 1: the neighbors following up because they probably saw more. But
Speaker 1: people are friends or acquaintances of the hearts. There's no
Speaker 1: way they knew anything was wrong. There's it's not possible.
Speaker 1: Maybe if you really wanted to be a very critical,
Speaker 1: judgmental person, you may have said, well, they're too perfect,
Speaker 1: I'm going to dive into this, or you know the
Speaker 1: kids are skinny, Well we just thought they were eating
Speaker 1: organic food in that scene. There's a lot of people
Speaker 1: who are skinny, and I think the whole food thing.
Speaker 1: You know, Look, if I was not wanting to ulified
Speaker 1: himanized Jen, I would say, well, she didn't know how
Speaker 1: to punish them, because six kids who have developmental disabilities
Speaker 1: are going to be tough to raise, and so maybe
Speaker 1: this was her way of trying to find a punishment
Speaker 1: that was appropriate. Was you know, well you're going to
Speaker 1: bed without dinner tonight type of thing, and they morphed
Speaker 1: into a bigger deal with reheards in the neighbors finding
Speaker 1: out about and stuff like that. Who knows. That's one
Speaker 1: way to look at it. I think the more realistic
Speaker 1: way to look at it is she actually was holding
Speaker 1: from them for quite a bit. I think another way
Speaker 1: to look at it was that's how she controlled them.
Speaker 1: On Tuesday, April five, two thousand eleven, all six Heart
Speaker 1: kids were pulled out of Woodland Elementary School. This time
Speaker 1: they never went back. The Heart family was officially off
Speaker 1: the grid. The following year, Sarah Hart was discharged from
Speaker 1: supervised probation in Minnesota and moved to Oregon to find
Speaker 1: a new job. We don't know how often the kids
Speaker 1: got to see Sarah during this time, but her absence
Speaker 1: must have been hard on them. They already had a
Speaker 1: lot of disruption in their lives. They've been removed from
Speaker 1: the homes of their biological families, in some cases, families
Speaker 1: they would have remembered during this time. On December twelve,
Speaker 1: Jen had a car accident with the kids in Missoula, Montana.
Speaker 1: The car she was driving was the Yukon, the same
Speaker 1: one she was driving when she went off the cliff,
Speaker 1: as she described it on Facebook, once, twice, three times.
Speaker 1: Finally we crashed into the side of the gently sloping mountain.
Speaker 1: In what was most likely seconds, so many inexplicable thoughts
Speaker 1: ran through my mind. Was I dead? There was no
Speaker 1: way we could have all survived such an incident. I
Speaker 1: unclenched my fists from the steering wheel, brushed off the glass,
Speaker 1: and turned my head back to see all six kids
Speaker 1: hanging upside down? Are you okay? Every single child was
Speaker 1: safely secured by their seatbelts. Jen then goes into a
Speaker 1: lengthy description of a couple who bent over backwards to
Speaker 1: help them, even offering to drive the Hearts the rest
Speaker 1: of the way to Portland, where they were going to
Speaker 1: see Sarah. We weren't able to find any record of
Speaker 1: the accident, Jen describes. However, after the Hearts died, Brian Lee,
Speaker 1: the husband from the couple who offered to drive them
Speaker 1: that night, was interviewed by The Oregonian. He remembers meeting
Speaker 1: the family after they were involved in what he calls
Speaker 1: a rollover accident. He says he and his wife rented
Speaker 1: a trailer to tow the Hearts car to Spokan and
Speaker 1: the Jen talked for the entire three hour drive. She
Speaker 1: must have been starved for adult company. Interestingly, Lee says
Speaker 1: the accident happened the day after Christmas, not two days before,
Speaker 1: as Jen said in her Facebook post when she posted
Speaker 1: about the event. Years later, she made the family's survival
Speaker 1: sound like a Christmas miracle. The fact that the accident
Speaker 1: happened right before Christmas seemed to be the whole point.
Speaker 1: Of course, Lee might have been mistaken about the date,
Speaker 1: but this discrepancy could be yet another bit of evidence
Speaker 1: that Jen had her own interpretation of facts. A few
Speaker 1: months later, Jen and the kids reunited with Sarah for
Speaker 1: good in their new home in West Lynn, Oregon, about
Speaker 1: fifteen miles outside of Portland's. Jen immortalized their goodbye on Facebook,
Speaker 1: leaving out the mom's brushes with the law. Here's what
Speaker 1: she wrote, Packing the past ten years of my life
Speaker 1: into boxes. It's almost surreal walking through the house. Empty walls,
Speaker 1: empty drawers, empty cupboards, empty rooms. The kids arn't supplies, instruments, games,
Speaker 1: and toys are packed. I was feeling kind of awful
Speaker 1: about the lack of things for them to do during
Speaker 1: the transition time until this morning. I was taking down
Speaker 1: the boy's bunk beds and heard the loudest, silliest, full
Speaker 1: on belly laughs and cafaws coming from the other room.
Speaker 1: I walk in to see a trio of the kids
Speaker 1: sitting slash laying on the bare floor Not a single
Speaker 1: thing exists in that room aside from their little bodies.
Speaker 1: They were telling stories, making up silly songs, and laughing
Speaker 1: themselves into sprawled out piles of utter bliss. Ah. Yes,
Speaker 1: simplicity at its finest. What a beautiful reminder that the
Speaker 1: things that matter most are not things at all. We
Speaker 1: have each other. Our songs are laughter, our love. These
Speaker 1: are the magic moments, live, love, laugh. People liked this post.
Speaker 1: I headed south of Portland to the suburb of West Lynne.
Speaker 1: It's in Clackamus County, the area or Tanya Harding had
Speaker 1: grown up. I've recently seen Tanya, so I've been expecting
Speaker 1: the scruppy, white working class neighborhoods from the movie. Instead,
Speaker 1: on the bluff over the Willamette River and it's mostly
Speaker 1: defunct paper Mills, is an upscale main drag filled with
Speaker 1: pilate studios, a juice shop, a plastic surgeon offering botox.
Speaker 1: The nearby streets are lined with tidy clapboard houses and
Speaker 1: picket fences, but two stuck out for being less manicured
Speaker 1: than the others. When had been the house that the
Speaker 1: Hearts rented when they moved to Oregon and next to
Speaker 1: it the house of Bill Groner. Groner is in his sixties,
Speaker 1: ruddy cheeks, belly, white goatee. You get the sense he
Speaker 1: be a really good mall Santa. Inside his house, an
Speaker 1: electric piano sits on his kitchen table, and his fridge
Speaker 1: is plastered with pictures of grandkids and a magnet that
Speaker 1: reads pray without ceasing. This is Bill. You can hear
Speaker 1: baseball games up all the way up here from the
Speaker 1: park down below. A lot of water skiing, a lot
Speaker 1: of boating. Actually got two neighbors down here across the
Speaker 1: street that have have boats, a lot of camping. The
Speaker 1: arts love to camp, I know, because they were seemed
Speaker 1: like they were often going out on expeditions with their
Speaker 1: canoes on the top of their their vehicle. They love
Speaker 1: getting away, which is one reason I thought, you know,
Speaker 1: they were good parents in the regard they were doing
Speaker 1: like fun outdoor stuff with their kids. It seems like
Speaker 1: they've been here like maybe for three years. Oh. First
Speaker 1: time I talked was at the mailbox, and one of
Speaker 1: them was a little though Gallop. I think she worked
Speaker 1: up at Cole's and Vancouver. I forget is that Sarah,
Speaker 1: And she was kind of the more open friendly one,
Speaker 1: and not that the other lady wasn't friendly. But I
Speaker 1: talked to Sarah at the mailbox. Conversation came up once
Speaker 1: there was something at the mailbox that she thought I
Speaker 1: can't remember what it was, whether it was uh, somebody
Speaker 1: had written something put in their mailbox, something that that
Speaker 1: she talked like she thought that she had gotten away
Speaker 1: from that by coming out here. So that was that
Speaker 1: was an issue for her again, you know, being uh gay,
Speaker 1: I guess, uh, and that that upset her. Basically intimated
Speaker 1: that she had the experience that they had experienced that
Speaker 1: because she had mentioned that that they had some problems before,
Speaker 1: you know, and she didn't go into detail, but she
Speaker 1: was just conscious that being gay that you know, in
Speaker 1: our society, and uh so I just thought, well, maybe,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't want her to think that I'm
Speaker 1: being judgmental, and I just want to be a good neighbor.
Speaker 1: We'd like to pause here to consider what Bill Groner
Speaker 1: is saying. Of course he doesn't want to a bad neighbor.
Speaker 1: Nobody does. But we do think the pains Bill and
Speaker 1: others took to give Jen and Sarah a wide birth
Speaker 1: might have enabled their mistreatment of the kids. To be clear,
Speaker 1: we're not placing the blame on Bill's shoulders or anyone else's,
Speaker 1: but we do want to call attention to the very
Speaker 1: human tendency not to get involved. We believe it might
Speaker 1: have landed the heart moms some free passes. Who wants
Speaker 1: to be the person who comes across as being homophobic
Speaker 1: or racist, or closed minded, or, as Bill himself said, judgmental.
Speaker 1: We're taught if you see something, say something, But we're
Speaker 1: also told you can't judge another woman until you walk
Speaker 1: in her shoes. If your neighbor's family looks different from yours,
Speaker 1: you might check yourself when you're questioning their decisions or
Speaker 1: their parenting. And in most cases that's the right thing
Speaker 1: to do. But where Jen and Sarah were concerned, political
Speaker 1: correctness might have provided them some cover for their double life.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'd see the up front once in a while,
Speaker 1: I'd see the kids, not very often, though not very often.
Speaker 1: I never saw him like walking up the street or
Speaker 1: anything like that. They were pretty much stayed in their yard.
Speaker 1: They were friendly, smiled, would say hi, but didn't really
Speaker 1: care out a conversation. I never saw any kind of
Speaker 1: friends or family over there visiting them. They didn't seemed
Speaker 1: to come out well that they didn't come outside very
Speaker 1: often at all. It was just stayed in the house
Speaker 1: a lot. So they were looking for land saving up
Speaker 1: that they became evident the reason they were here was
Speaker 1: just as a stop off place so they could, you know,
Speaker 1: with that many kids. This was a you know, a
Speaker 1: large house and kind of a nice kind of area
Speaker 1: that you know, not it's not like some places in Portland,
Speaker 1: you know, get some land and all that they could
Speaker 1: have animals. I know they were working on getting the
Speaker 1: financing together, remember when they were talking about that. They
Speaker 1: wanted to get back to the garden, as we used
Speaker 1: to say in the seventies. The Hearts were in West
Speaker 1: Lynne for four years before they moved an hour north
Speaker 1: to Woodland, Washington, to the house next door to the Decounts.
Speaker 1: They never registered as home schoolers, so for a while
Speaker 1: at least, the state of Oregon didn't know about six
Speaker 1: of its newest residents, but that would change. In two
Speaker 1: thousand thirteen, while Jen's Facebook account was at maximum activity
Speaker 1: with near daily post throughout the year, two whistleblowers report
Speaker 1: to the family to CPS. The first call came in
Speaker 1: on a few weeks after Jen posted a picture of
Speaker 1: a painfully thin Davante playing guitar. Me any particular reason
Speaker 1: you're naked him in the most matter of factly fashion.
Speaker 1: I'm not naked. I'm wearing a guitar. Yep, that's my
Speaker 1: string being. According to the CPS report, the first informant,
Speaker 1: who was anonymous, said Jen does this thing for her
Speaker 1: Facebook page, where the kids pose and are made to
Speaker 1: look like one big, happy family, but after the photo
Speaker 1: event they go back to looking lifeless. The same whistleblower
Speaker 1: said Jen had allowed each kid only a single slice
Speaker 1: of pizza for dinner, and when it turned out that
Speaker 1: someone had helped themselves to more during the night, she
Speaker 1: punished all six kids by making them wear sleeping masks
Speaker 1: and line and air mattress for five hours. The whistleblower
Speaker 1: noted that the kids would eat freely while Jen wasn't around,
Speaker 1: but once she entered the room, they deny that they've
Speaker 1: eaten at all. The second whistleblower identified herself as Alexandra
Speaker 1: arjiropolis She was a friend the hearts had stayed with
Speaker 1: when they traveled to San Francisco that summer. On Facebook,
Speaker 1: we see Davante in a zebra unitard again whip it thin,
Speaker 1: flashing a hang loose sign in front of the Golden
Speaker 1: Gate Bridge the caption good morning, City by the Bay.
Speaker 1: In a statement after their deaths Ardiropolis said Jen ran
Speaker 1: the family quote like a regimented boot camp, not letting
Speaker 1: the kids cry and punishing them for laughing too loudly. Also,
Speaker 1: according to Ardiropolis, quote, true kindness, love and respect for
Speaker 1: the kids was largely absent. Child Welfare visited the west
Speaker 1: Lynn house in August of two thousand and thirteen and
Speaker 1: interviewed each of the kids separately, despite their mom's hesitation
Speaker 1: about that arrangement. According to a CPS report, Davante volunteered
Speaker 1: to go first, and all of the kids answers were
Speaker 1: nearly identical, non mentioned pa st episodes of abuse, and
Speaker 1: Marcus said he was grateful to the moms for changing
Speaker 1: his life. One social worker noted that, with the exception
Speaker 1: of Davante quote, the kids appeared very reserved and showed
Speaker 1: little emotion or animation end quote. When it was their
Speaker 1: turn to speak to case workers. Jen and Sarah said
Speaker 1: Abigail had been quote labeled borderline mentally retarded, but they
Speaker 1: didn't believe the diagnosis and that Jeremiah was globally delayed,
Speaker 1: possibly even autistic. They also explained Hannah's missing front teeth
Speaker 1: like this, she had knocked them out while running on
Speaker 1: a hardwood floor the year before. Hannah told the CPS
Speaker 1: workers she needed to wait until she was seventeen to
Speaker 1: get a retainer with teeth. The case workers report noted
Speaker 1: that Jen was quote adamant that many of the family's
Speaker 1: issues stemmed from others not understanding their alternative lifestyle. Jen
Speaker 1: said she only disciplined the kids by talking to them
Speaker 1: or making them meditate for five minutes. A doctor who
Speaker 1: examined the kids for the Oregon Apartment of Human Services
Speaker 1: found all but one of the heart kids, Jeremiah, behind
Speaker 1: in their growth to the point of falling off in
Speaker 1: some cases, way off the chart for their ages. Still,
Speaker 1: a handwritten cover letter atop the report states the doctor
Speaker 1: had no concerns whatsoever with any of the children. Even so,
Speaker 1: the doctor recommended that a caseworker monitor the family and
Speaker 1: request follow up physicals in six months. This never happened.
Speaker 1: On October thirteen, the same week her six kids were
Speaker 1: examined on behalf of the state. Jen posted a picture
Speaker 1: of Davante holding a homemade piggy bank painted like a globe,
Speaker 1: with a caption that said he had the whole world
Speaker 1: in his hands. Up next time on Broken Hearts moving
Speaker 1: that will say a thing and I'm not race. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of white savior is symbolic in this story
Speaker 1: now that I never understood or knew about. These kids
Speaker 1: are being used with a prop. The fact that that
Speaker 1: would be utilized as a way to math some of
Speaker 1: the abuse in inglect that was happening within the home,
Speaker 1: It's just just disturbing. We love those kids so much.
Speaker 1: For access to exclusive photos and videos and documents about
Speaker 1: the case, visit glamour dot com slash Broken Hearts. Have
Speaker 1: questions for us about this podcast, reach us on Twitter
Speaker 1: at Glamour mag or at Broken Hearts Pod. If you
Speaker 1: like what you heard, leave us a review. Broken Hearts
Speaker 1: is a joint production between Glamour and How Stuff Works,
Speaker 1: with new episodes dropping every Tuesday. Broken Hearts is co
Speaker 1: hosted and co written by Justine Harmon and Elizabeth Egan
Speaker 1: and edited by Wendy Knockle. Lauren Smiley is our field reporter.
Speaker 1: Samantha Barry is Glamour's editor in chief. Julie Sheen and
Speaker 1: Dianna Buckman head up the business side of this partnership.
Speaker 1: Joyce Pandola, Pat Singer and Luke Zeleski are a research team.
Speaker 1: Jason Hope is executive producer on behalf of How Stuff Works,
Speaker 1: along with producers Julian Weller, ben Kie Brick and Josh Thaine.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to Jen Lance