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	More by this author
		Asgarian, Roxanna, 1987-

	Subjects
		Children -- Crimes against -- United States.
		Adopted children -- Crimes against -- United States.
		Children, Black -- Crimes against -- United States.
		Foster children -- Crimes against -- United States.
		Foster home care -- United States -- Case studies.
		Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Non-Fiction.

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		Asgarian, Roxanna, 1987-

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		We were once a famil...

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		362.7330973 A818w

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		Asgarian, Roxanna, 1987-
		Children -- Crimes against -- United States.
		Adopted children -- Crimes against -- United States.
		Children, Black -- Crimes against -- United States.
		Foster children -- Crimes against -- United States.
		Foster home care -- United States -- Case studies.
		Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Non-Fiction.


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We were once a family : a story of love, death, and child removal in America / Roxanna Asgarian.

by Asgarian, Roxanna, 1987-

View full image

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.

362.7330973 A818w

Children -- Crimes against -- United States.

Adopted children -- Crimes against -- United States.

Children, Black -- Crimes against -- United States.

Foster children -- Crimes against -- United States.

Foster home care -- United States -- Case studies.

Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Non-Fiction.

9780374602291 (hc.)

Alternate title:

Story of love, death, and child removal in America

xiv, 297 p. ; 21 cm.

Roxanna Asgarian is a Texas-based independent journalist who writes about child welfare and the law. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, New York, and Texas Monthly, among other publications. She received the 2022 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award for 'We Were Once a Family.'

Includes bibliographical references (pages [283]-294).

"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." --Jacket.

"The shocking, deeply reported story of a murder-suicide that claimed the lives of six children-and a searing indictment of the American foster care system"--From publisher.

Winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, 2024.

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