UPDATE: Hart friend says she reported family to Oregon authorities five years ago
The parents of Devonte Hart removed him and his five siblings from public schools in Minnesota the day after one of his mothers resolved a child-abuse court case, The Oregonian/OregonLive has learned.
Sarah Hart reached a probation agreement April 14, 2011, a week after she pleaded guilty to physically abusing one of her daughters, who was then 6 years old.
The next day, all six of their adopted children were taken out of public schools in Alexandria, where the family lived before moving to Oregon. They would never attend public school again.
"The leave date indicates all six children left prior to the end of the school year for a homeschool setting," Jill Johnson, a spokeswoman for the school district, told The Oregonian/OregonLive in an email.
An Alexandria police report obtained Tuesday also shows a different daughter told authorities in 2008 one of her mothers bruised her with a belt.
Asked by police about the beating, Jennifer and Sarah Hart said the girl had fallen down the stairs days before, the report shows.
The revelations come eight days after the Hart family's SUV was found at the bottom of a scenic cliff along the Northern California coast, a crash investigators believe may have been intentional.
The lifeless bodies of Jennifer, who was driving, and Sarah Hart, both 38, were in their overturned GMC Yukon on March 26, and three of their children — Markis, 19, Abigail, 14, and Jeremiah, 14 — were found dead outside the vehicle at the bottom of the 100-foot cliff.
Devonte Hart, 15, remains missing along with siblings Hannah, 16, and Sierra, 12. Devonte was at the center of a viral photo in The Oregonian/OregonLive in 2014 that captured his tender embrace with a Portland policeman during a "Black Lives Matter" protest.
All eight Harts left their home in Woodland, Washington, sometime after no one answered the door March 23 for a visit by child protective services, according to neighbors and the Clark County Sheriff's Office.
Authorities are now examining incidents from the family's past.
Court records in Minnesota show Sarah Hart in 2011 received a 90-day suspended jail sentence and a year of probation after daughter Abigail arrived at Woodland Elementary School with bruises on her stomach and back.
The girl's teacher contacted social services and police.
Abigail told authorities her mother struck her repeatedly with a closed fist, submerged her head under cold water and withheld meals from her for misbehaving, according to report by police in Alexandria, a small town northwest of Minneapolis where the family lived.
Though the girl said Jennifer Hart was the one who hit her, Sarah Hart pleaded guilty April 7, 2011, to misdemeanor domestic assault.
Previously, Abigail's older sister Hannah said in September 2008 it was her mother Jennifer who struck her with a belt, causing a bruise on her arm that attracted notice — and a call to authorities, according to the newly obtained Alexandria police report.
In an interview, both mothers told a police sergeant and social worker they had no idea how Hannah, who was 6 at the time, got the bruise but said she had recently fallen down the stairs in their home.
The parents added the little girl was adopted and "has been going through food issues, where she'll steal other people's food at school or eat out of garbage cans or off the floor," the police report shows.
Records show the Hart children enrolled in Alexandria public schools Sept. 8, 2009 — seven months after Jennifer and Sarah finalized their adoption of siblings Devonte, Jeremiah and Sierra in Harris County, Texas. The women had previously adopted siblings Markis, Abigail and Hannah from Colorado County, Texas, in September 2006.
Two and a half years after enrolling, the children left public schools. Markis was a seventh-grader at Discovery Middle School, and the other five children, who ranged from kindergarten to third grade, attended Woodland Elementary.
Scott Heckert, the principal of Woodland at the time, recalled the Harts as an insular family whose children — despite being amiable and outgoing among their peers — rarely spent time with others outside the classroom.
"They stayed under the radar and liked to be alone and away from other people," Heckert said of Jennifer and Sarah, adding the children received extra attention from teachers and faculty after the abuse allegations.
Heckert, in an interview with The Oregonian/OregonLive Tuesday, said the unconventional family, whose same-sex parents and multiracial children sometimes faced disapproval in the conservative-leaning town of 13,000, had talked about moving to San Francisco.
That appears to have never happened.
Instead, the family relocated to West Linn sometime in 2013, according to friends.
The Harts homeschooled their children, according to friends and neighbors in Oregon, Washington and in Minnesota. But they never filed the proper notices in Oregon and Washington, according to agencies in both states.
The two states require families to tell officials that they're homeschooling their children, with notice to their local school system in Washington and to their regional service district in Oregon.
The Clackamas Education Service District, which oversees West Linn, said it had no record of the children. David Holmes, superintendent of schools in La Center said the same thing after the family moved to Washington.
Officials have no other way to track when homeschooling families move in or out of their district, Holmes said. "It's totally up to the family to notify."
Bruce and Dana DeKalb, who lived next door in Washington, said Devonte had come to their home a dozen times to ask for food, saying his parents had withheld it as a form of punishment.
The DeKalbs also recounted that three months after the family moved into a home on 2 acres last May, one of the girls rang their doorbell in the middle of the night.
The girl, who they later learned was Hannah, "was at our door in a blanket saying we needed to protect her," Bruce DeKalb said. "She said that they were abusing her."
Others had concerns as well. In a statement provided to The Associated Press, Alexandra Argyropoulos, a former friend of the Harts, said she "witnessed what I felt to be controlling emotional abuse and cruel punishment" toward the six children. She said the Harts had been depriving their children of food as punishment.
After reporting her concerns in 2013, Argyropoulos said, she was told the Hart children had been interviewed by officials from the Oregon department; it was apparent that each child had been coached by their mothers on what to say; and nothing more could be done.
She said the couple broke off contact with her after she went to Oregon officials.
"My heart is completely broken. The current system failed to protect these children from their abusers," Argyropoulos said.
Oregonian/OregonLive reporter Molly Young and The Associated Press contributed to this story.
-- Shane Dixon Kavanaugh
skavanaugh@oregonian.com
503-294-7632 || @shanedkavanaugh