HIGHWAY of HORROR
The cliff is exactly the kind of place where Jennifer Hart loved to photograph her kids for Facebook. It has a green-edged bluff right off California’s Highway 1, with a gravel strip leading straight to a dramatic 30-metre drop into the Pacific. In other circumstances, on other trips, Jen and her wife, Sarah, might have pulled to the side of the road and lined up their brood as they often did: backs to the camera, hands raised in peace signs, a technicolour sunset framing their silhouettes. They were Markis, 19, Hannah, 16, Devonte, 15, Abigail, 14, Jeremiah, 14, and Sierra, 12 – two sets of black biological siblings adopted by two white mums – a beautiful family, by most accounts. Friends called them “the Hart Tribe”.
But the photo from March 26 would not be like the other pictures taken on countless family road trips. The photo the world saw from that day was of the family’s SUV belly up on the rocks below the scenic overpass. After rescue workers abseiled down the cliff, they lifted the dead bodies of three children and spotted two more corpses: 38-year-old Sarah in the back and Jen, also 38, in the driver’s seat. The coroner found diphenhydramine, an ingredient commonly found in allergy medicines like Benadryl, in the bodies of Sarah and two of the kids; Jen’s blood alcohol content was over the legal limit. No-one had been wearing a seatbelt. The car’s computer revealed that Jen had stopped on a gravel pullout some 21 metres from the cliff moments before the free fall, and then accelerated. “I’m to the point where I no longer am calling this as an accident,” the county sheriff declared 10 days later. “I’m calling it a crime.”
Back near the Harts’ home in Woodland, Washington, approximately 900 kilometres to the north, Dana DeKalb, 58, had yet to hear any of the gruesome details. But when she saw the pictures of the overturned vehicle on TV, she immediately said to her
