The Boy in the Photograph: The Disappearance of Devonte Hart

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

May 1, 2026

Most people who remember Devonte Hart remember him from a single photograph. It was taken on November 25, 2014, at a demonstration in Portland, Oregon held in solidarity with protests in Ferguson, Missouri, after a grand jury declined to indict the police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown. In the photo, twelve-year-old Devonte stands in front of a line of police in riot gear, a sign reading "Free Hugs" around his neck, tears running down his face. A Portland police sergeant named Bret Barnum knelt down, asked him what was wrong, and then asked if he wanted a hug. The image, taken by a young freelance photographer named Johnny Nguyen who had never had a photo published before, was shared hundreds of thousands of times within days. People called it the hug felt around the world. It became shorthand for the idea that connection could survive even the worst of a country's divisions.

Three and a half years later, Devonte was gone. On March 26, 2018, a GMC Yukon XL registered to his adoptive mother went over a cliff on Highway 1 in Mendocino County, California, and dropped more than a hundred feet into the Pacific Ocean. Inside were his two mothers and five of his siblings. All of their bodies were eventually recovered from the wreckage or the surrounding water. Devonte's never was. He was fifteen years old, and the investigation that followed his disappearance would turn the photograph that made him famous into something much harder to look at.

Two Families Becoming One

Devonte was born in Houston, Texas in October 2002. He had two full biological siblings, an older brother named Jeremiah and a younger sister named Ciera. Their mother, Sherry Davis, lost custody of the three children in 2006 after struggles with addiction. Around the same time, a Minnesota couple named Jennifer and Sarah Hart had already adopted three other Black children from Texas, a boy named Markis and two girls named Hannah and Abigail. In June 2008, the Harts adopted Devonte, Jeremiah, and Ciera as well, blending the two sets of siblings into one family of six children raised by two mothers in Alexandria, Minnesota.

From the outside, and especially on the social media accounts Jennifer Hart maintained, the family looked like a portrait of progressive, big-hearted parenting. There were photos of camping trips, homeschool co-ops, and family outings, the kind of images that made the Harts minor celebrities among people who followed adoption and blended-family accounts online. Jennifer wrote often about resilience and love. Sarah kept a lower profile but was present in nearly every photo.

The private reality, according to years of reports from teachers, neighbors, and family friends across three states, looked very different.

A Decade of Warnings

The first documented concerns came out of Minnesota not long after the adoption was finalized. A teacher noticed bruising on Hannah's arm and reported that she said she had been hit with a belt. All six children were pulled out of public school and homeschooled for roughly a year. In 2010, Abigail told someone outside the family that she had been beaten and had her head held under cold water as punishment. Sarah Hart pleaded guilty to domestic assault and malicious punishment of a child, and received a suspended sentence along with probation and community service. Not long after, Hannah told a school nurse she had not eaten in a full day. Sarah's explanation was that Hannah was "playing the food card." After that, the children were homeschooled permanently, which meant the number of adults with regular, mandated eyes on them dropped sharply.

The family moved to Oregon, and the reports continued through informal channels rather than official ones. Family friends later described a household run like a boot camp, where children had to raise their hands to speak, were not allowed to wish each other happy birthday, and could be punished by being sent to bed without breakfast over something as small as an extra slice of pizza going missing. An Oregon investigation into the family was opened and closed as inconclusive.

It was during the Oregon years, in November 2014, that the photograph happened. Devonte had gone to the demonstration with his mothers. He later told the officer he was worried about how police treated Black children, and the officer told him he understood and was sorry. The hug that followed was captured almost by accident, and it made Devonte, briefly, one of the most recognizable children in the country. Few of the people who shared the photo knew anything about what his home life actually looked like.

By 2017, the family had relocated again, this time to Woodland, Washington. That August, Hannah climbed out of a second story window and ran to a neighbor's house, begging not to be sent back, telling them her mothers were racist and abusive. Around the same time, Devonte began quietly showing up at the home of neighbors Bruce and Dana DeKalb, sometimes more than once a day, asking for food. He told them his mothers withheld meals from the children as a form of discipline, and he would ask for tortillas, cured meats, anything that did not need to be cooked or explained. The DeKalbs eventually contacted Child Protective Services.

The Last Days

On March 23, 2018, a Washington state caseworker went to the Hart home after the DeKalbs' report. Nobody answered the door. The caseworker left a card. Within hours, according to neighbors, the family left the house. They did not go back.

What followed were several days on the road, tracked afterward through hotel receipts, gas station stops, and a Wisconsin cousin who had spoken with Jennifer only obliquely about needing space. The family made their way south and eventually reached the coast of Northern California. Investigators later found that Sarah's phone contained deleted search history from those final days, including queries about the lethality of Benadryl overdoses and the mechanics of death by drowning.

On the afternoon of March 26, 2018, the Yukon was found upside down in the surf below a stretch of Highway 1 near Juan Creek, close to the small town of Westport. Data pulled from the vehicle's computer showed it had come to a full stop at a gravel pullout about seventy feet from the cliff's edge, and had then accelerated toward the drop at full throttle, with no evidence of braking. Jennifer, who had been driving, had a blood alcohol level of .102, above California's legal limit. Sarah and at least two of the children who were recovered had diphenhydramine, the active ingredient in Benadryl, in their systems.

When investigators searched the family's home in Woodland afterward, they found it unsettlingly bare. The children's bedrooms held little more than a twin bed and foam furniture. Picture frames hung on the walls with no photographs inside them. A former coworker later said Sarah had once told her she wished someone had told her it was okay not to have such a large family.

What Was Never Found

Five bodies were recovered in or near the wreck: Jennifer and Sarah Hart, and their children Markis, Hannah, Jeremiah, and Abigail. Ciera's body was found separately nearby. Devonte's was not, and searches along the coastline in the weeks that followed turned up nothing. In April 2019, a fourteen-member coroner's jury in Mendocino County unanimously ruled the deaths a murder-suicide, and a judge determined there was a preponderance of evidence that Devonte had been in the vehicle when it went over the cliff, even without a body to confirm it. His death certificate was signed that April.

There is something particularly cruel about the fact that the most famous image of Devonte Hart shows him being comforted, held, told that someone understood what he was going through. The photograph was real. The tears were real. But the hands that were supposed to be holding him the rest of the time were, according to a decade of reports that went unheeded or unresolved, doing the opposite. He asked neighbors for food. His sister climbed out a window to escape. A caseworker knocked on a door that no one answered, days before six children died on a cliff above the Pacific. Devonte Hart was fifteen years old, and the ocean that took him has not given him back.

Sources