Family friend Max Ribner, a Portland musician who plays in the band Nahko and Medicine for the People, said the Harts were amazing parents.
"They'd nursed those six kids back to life," he said. "These children were coming from some of the roughest childhoods you could imagine."
Ribner said he first met the family in 2012 when playing the Shangri-La music festival in Clarks Grove, Minnesota. He said he remembered the Hart children because they had dressed in matching outfits and were as close to the stage as possible. The family, he said, always traveled as a pack.
Ribner said that Sarah Hart first came out to Portland around 2012 to look for a job and to see if the area would be a good fit for their family. They'd been living Alexandria, Minnesota, a small town of 13,000 northwest of Minneapolis.
She found a job at Kohl's. Jennifer and the kids joined her sometime in 2013, he said.
"I think there was an openness of community out here that gave them some breathing room from the challenges they had in Minnesota."
Ribner said the mothers talked often about the difficulties they faced because they were a same-sex couple raising six adopted black children.
Of the children, Ribner said, "They were readers, they were writers, they were poets, they were dancers. And they were brave. They didn't have any judgment. But they also felt pain, too."
In 2013, Ribner began offering music classes to kids at his home in Southeast Portland. He said that all six of the Hart children participated in the program and that he and the children wrote songs together and played music twice a month for nearly a year.
He said that music was a passion in the Hart family.
"They exposed their children to conscious music with a message. Music that talks about social revolution and racial equality."
The kids never had cellphones. But they traveled and explored. They regularly attended concerts, events and festivals in the Portland area and throughout the Northwest.
He said the family was civically engaged and community-oriented. They volunteered with homeless people. Devonte would forgo gifts for his birthday, instead asking friends and family to donate money to a charity. They loved celebrating Earth Day.
Ribner once asked Devonte what he wanted to be when he grew up. The boy's answer? "A hero."
