Jim Ryan/The Oregonian

Clark County Sheriff's investigators comb through the rural Woodland property where Jennifer and Sarah Hart lived with their six children in this photo from March. Police were searching for any clues about what led to the family's fatal crash days earlier.

By EVERTON BAILEY JR. and MOLLY YOUNG

The police search of the Hart family home, days after a March crash off the northern California coast presumably killed them all, turned up few indications that six children were being raised there. The home contained only one twin bed for them.

Nearly half the family’s income in most recent years came from money designated for care of the kids, all adopted out of foster care in Texas, an analysis of recently released records by The Oregonian/OregonLive found.

Investigators couldn’t figure out where the children slept in the Woodland, Washington home, the new records from the Clark County Sheriff’s Office show.

The parents had a double bed. Another bedroom contained two foam loveseats and a padded mat where police believed some of the children may have slept. The third bedroom held the twin bed.

Jennifer and Sarah Hart, parents of the six, lived beyond their means, and aspects of their lifestyle diverged widely from what they presented publicly online, the records show.

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Clark County Sheriff's Office

The three bedrooms in the Hart family home shared a bathroom on the top floor of the split-level home and looked out on to their sweeping 2-acre property. Police concluded the bedroom at left belonged to Hart parents, while the middle bedroom contained a twin bed surrounded by remodeling supplies. The third bedroom held two foam loveseats and a small mat that police said the children may have slept on.

Deputies and cadaver dogs searched the family's rural property in April for signs of three children who remained unaccounted for and found no evidence of bodies. Nor did detectives turn up any clues why the family went on an apparently abrupt trip late in March that ended when Jennifer Hart drove her family's SUV off an oceanside cliff.

But the investigation found that money was tight and the adopted children were money-makers. According to records found at the scene, two of the children yielded the family payments of about $11,000 a year from a man who identifies as the stepfather in their birth family.

Jennifer Hart was a stay-at-home parent who homeschooled the children, and Sarah Hart earned about $45,000 as an assistant manager at Kohl's, records showed. The couple also appeared to bring in as much as $41,000 in a typical year from payments intended for the children's well-being, according to The Oregonian/OregonLive's analysis.

The parents had recently purchased the $375,000 three-bedroom home and accumulated more than $21,000 in credit card debt, according to the documents from Clark County.

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Facebook/Jennifer Hart

Devonte Hart, the family's middle son, reads a book in the main floor sitting area of the house. Over the 10 months the Harts lived there, they painted the walls, replaced the flooring and prepared to plant a spring garden.

Two of the children told neighbors in the months and days leading up to their disappearance that their parents abused and underfed them. An Oregon doctor who examined the children in 2013 found that nearly all of them were so small they were off the growth charts for height and weight. One son, Devonte Hart, 15, asked neighbors for tortillas, bread and cured meat for himself and his siblings. The neighbor ultimately called Washington child welfare officials, who knocked on the family’s door the day before they left.

Police hoping to find clues later discovered chest freezers in the family’s home filled with lunch meat, tortillas and copious amounts of bread. They found the home clean and orderly, except for dirty dishes in the kitchen sink and some clothes piled in heaps around the house, more than 270 police photos taken at the home show. Investigators found school supplies, board games and a small library filled with Harry Potter, Twilight and other young adult novels.

No family photos were on display anywhere in the home. No keepsakes, posters or other personal objects indicated that children and teenagers lived in the bedrooms.

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Clark County Sheriff's Office

Police photos of the Hart family home displayed few signs of the family's size. Six wooden chairs sat around the dining room table for the family of eight.

Rescue crews in Mendocino County, California discovered the bodies of three of the children, Markis Hart, the oldest at 19, Abigail Hart, 14, and Jeremiah Hart, 14, near the wreckage of their family vehicle March 26. Evidence shows their mother Jennifer Hart, 38, was drunk when she drove off the cliff, authorities say.

California investigators believe the SUV was in the ocean for some time, because water had pooled up and grown warm inside the wheel wells, the Clark County reports said. The high tide likely carried all of the children out of the SUV and some several hundred yards away from the wreckage, according to the reports. Jennifer Hart and Sarah Hart, 38, were found inside.

The body of Sierra Hart, 12, was found 10 days later. Devonte, 15, and Hannah Hart, 16, still haven't been found. Testing of remains believed to be the foot of a female hasn't yet yielded an identity, the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office said.

The Hart family moved to the Woodland acreage in May 2017 after several years living in a rented home in West Linn. The couple registered to vote and registered the title to their car in Washington. They began to renovate the sweeping property with horse stalls, garden beds and a walkout basement.

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Clark County Sheriff's Office/Facebook

Jennifer Hart often shared anecdotes about the family's vegetarian lifestyle online. In their Woodland home, chicken, beef and pork filled part of the Hart family's fridge.

The family’s living situation didn’t always match what Jennifer Hart wrote about in prolific posts on Facebook. She regularly discussed the family’s vegetarian lifestyle, once posting a photo of Sierra smiling as she held a bunch of kale bigger than her head.

Clark County investigators in March found the family’s fridge stocked with hot dogs, ham, large packs of chicken breasts and a large roll of ground beef. The freezer held corn dogs, frozen tilapia and pizza snack rolls.

A close friend told The Oregonian/OregonLive weeks after the crash that Jennifer Hart did not drink, but Sarah Hart did occasionally. Police photos show 17 bottles of wine displayed on kitchen counters. The couple also had a container of recreational marijuana and a small pipe on a dresser in their bedroom. Neighbors said the family appeared to keep to themselves and didn’t seem to have guests, according to the police reports.

Jennifer Hart’s social media posts portrayed a family that spurned television and kept children largely away from electronic screens in favor of camping, gardening, reading books and caring for animals. “Traded in the television for the best big screen available. Planet Earth,” she wrote in May 2013, shortly after the family moved to Oregon.

Police found a large screen TV in the family’s common space and a tablet and a laptop in the home. The Clark County Sheriff’s Office has not yet said what the content of the electronics revealed.

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The Hart siblings -- Sierra, far left, Devonte, Hannah, Jeremiah, Abigail and Markis -- were adopted by Jennifer and Sarah Hart when the couple lived in rural Minnesota. Markis, Abigail and Hannah are biological siblings, as are Devonte, Jeremiah and Sierra.

The couple struggled to keep up with their expenses on one paycheck, records show.

Investigators found statements for two credit cards with a combined balance of $16,750. The couple paid $8,000 the prior month to bring down their Discover card balance, which had exceeded $21,000.

Their next payment was due March 28. Investigators found that the last financial transaction made from the couple’s bank account was a payment to the card in the early morning hours of March 26, the day the crash was discovered. It’s unclear what the amount was or whether it was an automated payment.

The children were an important source of income. Texas paid the family roughly $30,000 a year in adoption assistance payments, according to records obtained from the Texas comptroller’s office. Those payments decreased by about $550 a month in August 2016, the month after Markis turned 18. The final payment to the family was $1,900 on March 2.

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Clark County Sheriff's Office

Receipts, utility bills and Sarah Hart's work schedule shared counter space with fresh fruit and wine in the Hart family kitchen. One receipt documents a March 20 purchase at Big Lots, six days before the family's fatal crash was discovered.

Two sons, biological brothers Devonte and Jeremiah, also brought in additional monthly payments paid from the retirement account of Nathaniel Davis. Documents detailing the payments list Davis as the Devonte’s father.

The documents show Jeremiah’s benefits amounted to $5,400 every year. If Devonte brought in the same amount, that netted the family $10,800.

Another man, Clarence Celestine, told The Oregonian/OregonLive in April that he is the father of Jeremiah and the boys’ younger sister, Sierra. Celestine’s sister unsuccessfully tried to adopt all three of the children from foster care in 2006. Court records in her adoption appeals case confirm that her brother, not Davis, is Jeremiah’s father.

Records show that Davis tried to join the case to stop child support payments made to at least one of the children. But the records don’t make clear who the money was going to or how Davis was related to the recipient. Davis has since said that he is married to their mother and has called himself their stepfather.

A working phone number for Davis could not be located.

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Brothers Jeremiah, left, and Devonte were born 16 months apart in Houston.

Texas holds parents responsible for children in foster care, and courts sometimes order parents to pay child support. It’s unclear why the payments from Davis continued after adoption. A parent who has lost custody could still owe past child support at the time their child is adopted by new parents, said Miranda Summer, a juvenile law attorney in Portland.

The discovery of the Social Security payments prompted Clark County detectives to contact the Social Security Administration. Most of the children received new Social Security numbers when they were adopted.

Jennifer Hart is listed as the mother of all of the children.

On Friday, the Hart family home was listed for sale.

-- Everton Bailey

-- Molly Young

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Clark County Sheriff's Office

The family lived in West Linn for several years before they moved to Washington and switched out the license plates on their GMC Yukon.

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Neighbors told police they never saw the family's SUV without their red kayak affixed to the top until the family drove away together March 24. Police found the kayak behind the home when they searched the property.

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Clark County Sheriff's Office

One of the bedrooms in the Hart family home. Neighbors said the couple's oldest daughter, Hannah Hart, jumped out of one of the bedroom windows in October 2017 and ran to tell her neighbors in the middle of the night that she was being abused.

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Police found an open bag of mealworms strewn across the dining room floor when they searched the Hart family's home in the days after the crash. Animal Control took away several animals from the house at the same time.

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In the ground-level basement of the Hart home, bookshelves line a small library and school supplies fill a shelf in a family room. Piles of laundry are stacked in the nearby bathroom that doubled as a laundry room.

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Jim Ryan/The Oregonian

Police photograph a Pontiac Sunfire left at the Hart family home. The car still had Oregon tags.

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Video security footage captured the last sighting of Sarah Hart on March 23 as she drove the Sunfire away from her job at the Hazel Dell Kohl's.

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Coworkers told police that Sarah Hart once arrived at work with her hometown covered on her name badge and explained that her wife, Jennifer, did not want people to know where they lived.