UPDATE 4/4/19 8:50 PM

The jury returned verdicts in the Hart case on Thursday, ruling that the mothers died by suicide and all six children died by homicide. Each decision was unanimous and the deliberations took just one hour. The manner of death will now be entered by the county onto each one of their official death certificates.

The four options presented to the jury were: natural, suicide, accident, and "at the hands of another, other than by accident," which the sheriff clarified is homicide.

In some of the final testimony of the day, California Highway Patrol Officer Jake Slates said, "Ultimately, I feel that based on Sarah and Jen's history, the pattern of alleged abuse, that this was just another case where they ran."

Slates believes the women had not yet totally decided on the suicide plan while Googling about methods on Saturday or while they were buying groceries at Safeway or toiletries at Dollar Tree on Sunday morning. At some point, Slates says, while driving along the coast in their final day, they decided to commit to the plan. That "if they couldn't have those kids, then nobody was going to have those kids."

Mendocino County Sheriff Lt. Shannon Barney echoed Slates' conclusion on the stand: "It is my belief that both Jennifer and Sarah succumbed to a lot of pressure ... to the point they made a conscious decision to end their lives and to take the children with them."

ORIGINAL STORY:

Last September Glamour reported on the tragic story of the Harts—mothers Jennifer and Sarah Hart and their six adopted children. On social media Jen Hart portrayed the image of a happy, postracial American family, but what was going on inside their Woodland, Washington, home turned out to be something very different.

Jen, Sarah, and their children Markis, 19, Hannah, 16, Devonte, 15, Abigail, 14, Jeremiah, 14, and Sierra, 12 (two sets of black biological siblings) were often referred to as the Hart Tribe. But on March 26, 2018, their car was found at the bottom of a cliff off California's Highway 1.

In the coroner’s inquest today at the Willitts Justice Center in Willitts, California, investigators have revealed the timeline of what happened in the family’s final hours. Among the new details revealed in testimony today was exactly what was in the system of each family member when the Yukon plummeted off the cliff. Evidence presented showed that many members of the family were most likely heavily sedated, with Sarah, who investigators say was in the passenger seat, having the equivalent of 42 single doses of diphenhydramine, a Benadryl-like drug, in her system.

Jennifer was driving—and was legally drunk—but didn’t show signs of having taken diphenhydramine. Investigators revealed that the family had purchased an Equate-branded version at a Walmart in Washington State shortly after leaving their house on March 23, 2018, before continuing down the Pacific coast. Both liquid and pill versions of the drug were found in the family’s car.

California Highway Patrol Officer Jake Slates, the lead investigator on the case, testified that by his calculations Markis had taken the equivalent of more than 19 doses, Abigail had taken 14 doses, and Jeremiah had taken more than eight single doses. Slates said that Sarah would have likely been “intoxicated” by the amount she had taken, and the kids would “more than likely be unconscious or asleep.”

The body of Devonte, the teen featured in a photo hugging a cop that went viral, is still missing, though he was officially pronounced dead in a California court in March.

Investigators also concluded that no one had been wearing a seat belt and that Jen had accelerated the car before going off the cliff.

Early after the accident the county sheriff said he suspected criminal intent. "I'm to the point where I no longer am calling this as an accident," he said at the time. "I'm calling it a crime." The mystery of what happened to the Harts, the possible warning signs that alerted some of their neighbors, and the ongoing investigation by law enforcement are documented in the Glamour podcast Broken Harts.

At the inquest, a jury of 14 will decide the manner of death for each family member. "There’s one question that nobody will ever answer—that’s 'why,'" Mendocino County Sheriff-Coroner Tom Allman told Glamour. Why Jen drove over that cliff, why Jen and Sarah made the decisions that led up to that day and that moment. "We can tell you what, almost when, where; we can tell you who. But as an adult whose brother committed suicide many years ago, I’ve learned that sometimes the question why can never be answered. We can give people reason to find their own answer, but there won’t be any black-and-white answer to why." While authorities did not disclose some evidence over the past several months as they investigated the crash, that's no longer the case: "There is no reason for one percent of what we know to be withheld," Allman said. "Everything we know we're throwing out there.”

Glamour will release a special bonus episode of Broken Harts on April 12, with more information about everything that is revealed in the inquest, which is expected to conclude tomorrow. But here's what we've learned so far from the evidence presented.

(Warning: Some of the details below are graphic in nature.)

Sarah was googling suicide methods.

Starting around 12:30 A.M. on March 24—hours after they had left home and about the time they reached the Washington-Oregon border—Sarah began googling suicide methods. "Can 500 mg of Benadryl kill an 120-pound woman?" "Is death by drowning relatively painless?" "How long does it take to die by hypothermia?" and "How easily can you overdose on over-the-counter medication or Benadryl?" were some of the searches she typed into her phone. The searches continued until 6:30 P.M. that day, around the time the family reached the California border.

The abuse may have continued until the children's final days.

The autopsy report found that Abigail's body had bruising on her buttocks and legs. Slate asked medical examiners whether they were caused by the crash, and was told the bruises were old but recent—and not a result of the accident.

Devonte Hart has been pronounced legally dead.

Fifteen-year-old Devonte's remains were never recovered, and some had held out hope that he somehow survived the crash or ran away prior to its occurrence. Mendocino Sheriff's Lieutenant Shannon Barney stated in a court filing that "it is more probable than not that Devonte Hart is deceased, and died along with his siblings and parents in the vehicle crash." Barney referenced that no sightings of Devonte or a child matching his description had been reported since the crash. Then a California judge certified Devonte as dead.

Someone may have survived the crash.

Testimony revealed there was an Alaskan couple camping at the pullout where the crash occurred. They saw a vehicle that matches the description of the Yukon park in the pull-out at around 11:00 P.M. The man said he was later awakened around 3 A.M. by hearing a vehicle engine rev and then “bottom out,” Slates, the lead investigator, said. The man looked outside, and since the car was gone, he assumed the vehicle had continued on down the highway. He stepped out of his camper, looked over the cliff, and saw nothing. (There are no road lights in this area.) He heard what he thought was an animal—a seal, perhaps. It wasn't until he heard the news of what had happened and realized the noises may have been a cry for help, meaning someone might have been alive down there.

Jen Hart's body was unidentifiable at first.

At the hearing Mendocino Sheriff Deputy Robert Julian revealed that in the attempt to pull the Harts' car up onto the cliffs, Jen's body tumbled out, and as a result it was more difficult for authorities to positively make an identification.

Greg Pizzaro, M.D., a forensic pathologist, testified about the autopsies of the parents and four of the children. He determined that they all died almost instantly from injuries sustained in the crash. However, the body of the youngest Hart daughter, Sierra, was not recovered until two weeks later and was too decomposed to determine a conclusive cause of death.

Jen Hart typically was a “seat belt Nazi.”

Slates testified that witnesses close to the family claimed that Jen typically was a “seat belt Nazi” and refused to drive until all the kids had been strapped in. That made it all more significant that investigators concluded no member was wearing a seat belt during the crash.

The women apparently didn't want to be found.

Slates revealed that Jen and Sarah used only cash for all their transactions after they left their home in Washington—until Jen used a Safeway club card in Fort Bragg, California. They also turned off their GPS once they got to Fort Bragg at 7:19 P.M. on March 24, the first time they had done so in nine years. After Sarah texted her coworker early Saturday morning saying she was sick and couldn't make it into work, Sarah and Jen did not text or call anyone else. Investigators were still able to approximate the family’s final route by the pings on their cell phones.

The Hart mothers had used Benadryl in the past on road trips.

Slates testified he’d heard from family and friends of the Harts that the women had used Benadryl-like medicine on past road trips to help the kids sleep.

The family was stopping for breaks as they went down the coast.

Investigators were able to recover the precise movements of the Yukon via the Garmin GPS device that had been mounted to the dash, recording the car’s trips since 2010. After washing ashore long after the crash, the device confirmed that the family left their house at 8:30 P.M. on March 23, the day that a CPS worker had visited the family’s home in response to a neighbor’s report of the Hart mothers’ alleged abuse toward their six adopted kids. They stopped at a beach for a half hour and drove south down U.S. Highway 101. The route means that the Harts would have seen the cliff they’d eventually plummet from as they drove south to Fort Bragg. They lingered in a campground area and at the Russian Gulch area south of Fort Bragg, before once again turning north up to the cliff site. The last ping was at 9:00 P.M. as they traveled north on 101.

This post will be updated as more evidence is presented during the inquest today. Testimony is expected to conclude Thursday afternoon, and the jury will be sent to deliberate.