Murder & Merlot: We Were Once a Family

Murder & Merlot is a true crime book club that meets from 6:00 - 7:00 pm on the second Tuesday of every month at Mimi's Retreat (125 East Ninth Street, Auburn). Join us for a glass and a discussion of classic and modern works of true crime. The books we read will be selected by members. All attendees must be over 21 and have valid ID On August 10th, we'll discuss We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America by Roxanna Asgarian. Description of We Were Once a Family from Macmillan Publishers: 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. ______________________________________ “The truth, of course, was much weirder: I was foregoing a fancy Hollywood party to return not to my sleeping infant but my laptop, to excavate through the night in search of information about a man I’d never met, who’d murdered people I didn’t know.” - Michelle McNamara, I'll Be Gone in the Dark