The picture of Jen and Sarah Hart, who drove off a California cliff with at least some of their kids, gets more complicated as friends recall a Minnesota teen they fostered. The women seemed caring and outgoing. “What happened to them in the last few years?” one friend asked. 
 
 When Sarah and Jen Hart drove off a cliff in California last month, they left a lot of questions about their treatment of six adopted children, at least some of whom died with them. Yet, they weren’t the only kids the couple took care of over the years. 
 
 The Harts fostered a teenage girl in the mid-2000s, according to three friends who knew them in Minnesota, where the couple lived before moving to the Pacific Northwest. 
 
 The Minnesota Department of Human Services confirmed the Harts had a foster-care license for two years beginning in April 2005. They were in their mid-20s then, a few years out of college. 
 
 Their Minnesota friends remember the couple talking about challenges with the teen they were fostering. But the overall picture they give is of a caring, friendly and outdoorsy couple during this part of their lives. 
 
 “They were passionate about trying to help” and being good people. “And they were,” said Kayla Schmitz, who got to know the Harts when all of them were working at Herberger’s department store in Alexandria, Minnesota. “The people I know wouldn’t starve their kids and lock them up.” 
 
 She’s referring to allegations of abuse that dogged the Harts — including depriving their adopted children of food, and a harsh spanking that resulted in a 2011 domestic-assault conviction for Sarah — as well as reports from neighbors suggesting the family lived an isolated life outside of the music festivals and rallies they attended. 
 
 Schmitz wondered, “What happened to them in the last few years?” 
 
 Fostering teen 
 
 The friends’ recollections add to the mystery that surrounds the family and a tragedy that may or may not have been intentional. California authorities have suggested their drive over the cliff was deliberate, based on software from the Harts’ family SUV, and the lack of skid marks at the cliff. 
 
 Sarah and Jen’s Minnesota friends said both women worked at Herberger’s in the early 2000s. Sarah was one of a handful of managers there. Jen was working in the Juniors department. 
 
 A lot of people didn’t know they were a couple, but with those who did, they talked about adopting children. 
 
 “We don’t really have the parts to get it done,” Schmitz remembered Jen joking in reference to having biological children. And there were so many kids who needed homes, Jen said, according to Schmitz. 
 
 She recalled the couple first signed up to foster children. 
 
 As Schmitz remembered it, the teen who came to them was a local girl, around 15, who was placed there temporarily. 
 
 The only frustration she remembered the couple voicing was about the teen neither doing homework nor listening to them on the subject. “It was more of a ‘How do we help her?’ kind of thing,” Schmitz said. 
 
 Jordie Smith, who also worked at Herberger’s then, said she heard more, and that the women seemed stressed. The girl would eat garbage out of the trash and wasn’t very smart, one of them told her. 
 
 One day, the couple brought the teen to the makeup counter where Smith gave her a makeover. “I feel like they were trying to get her out of her shell a little,” Smith said. 
 
 She said the girl wasn’t into it, and Jen and Sarah watched with their arms crossed, seemingly unsympathetic. 
 
 Cortney Johnson, whose ex-wife worked at Herberger’s, went camping with Sarah, Jen and their foster child one summer near Duluth, on Lake Superior. Nothing struck him as amiss. “Everyone was treated equally,” he said. 
 
 The Minnesota Department of Human Services said the Harts had no sanctions during the time they were fostering. She referred further inquiries to the local county’s social-services department. A county official did not return messages seeking comment. 
 
 The Harts’ three friends couldn’t remember how long the foster girl stayed with the Harts. Schmitz believed it was a few months, Johnson a couple of years. 
 
 Both stayed in touch afterward. Johnson, who lived with the Harts for a while after he got divorced, said he drove Jen and Sarah to the airport when they flew to Texas to pick up the first of two sets of siblings they adopted. “They were so excited,” he said. 
 
 He moved out of the Harts’ home then to let them get on with family life, but he would go over to dinner, he said. “We all sat around the table. Everyone cleared the dishes when they were done.” 
 
 “I don’t want to believe it,” he said of the abuse allegations that later surfaced. 
 
 He acknowledged Sarah’s domestic-assault conviction, which she told Alexandria police resulted from a spanking that got out of control. (The girl had said Jen hit her, but the couple said it was Sarah.) 
 
 “That can happen,” Johnson said. “Your anger gets the best of you. You don’t realize your own strength.” 
 
 Said Schmitz: “I’m not going to pass judgment,” noting that most people she knows spank their children. 
 
 “They can spank, but not to the point of bruising,” said retired-Detective Sgt. Larry Dailey in a phone interview this week, relating his investigation of the case. 
 
 Fallen out of touch 
 
 Other abuse allegations, made by neighbors, followed the couple after they moved to West Linn, Oregon, and then to Woodland, near Vancouver, Wash., with their six children. 
 
 Smith, Schmitz and Johnson had mostly fallen out of touch with the couple by then, though Johnson said he sometimes texted and kept up with their Facebook pages. To Schmitz, it seemed that the couple had cut ties with many of the people they used to know. 
 
 Unsure what to believe about the allegations, they spoke about the women they knew. 
 
 Schmitz, who was 18 when she met them, remembered Jen and Sarah always being willing to listen, and surprising her and her roommate on Christmas with a kitten. 
 
 Smith recalled a time that Jen, unhappy with the way female mannequins at Herberger’s had visible nipples because she believed it fed into society’s exploitation of women’s bodies, found a hacksaw from the store’s toolroom and sawed all the nipples off. 
 
 No one at the store reprimanded Jen, Smith remembered. Jen and Sarah “were really loved at that store,” Smith said. 
 
 And Johnson remembered Jen’s passion for photography and both women’s love of hiking and camping. “They were awesome, outgoing, always laughing,” he said. 
 
 Did they see only one side of the Harts, or did the couple change? There’s still a lot to learn. ||||| A 911 call released Monday regarding the Hart family offers a glimpse of how child welfare authorities made repeated attempts to contact the family following a tip the children may have been neglected or abused at their Woodland home. 
 
 The call was made just after 10:30 a.m. on March 26 – the same day the family’s SUV was found wrecked off a cliff along California’s coastline. 
 
 A Washington Child Protective Services investigator called Clark County emergency dispatch to request a welfare check on the family. 
 
 “Who are we checking on?” the dispatcher asks. 
 
 “The mothers are Sarah and Jennifer Hart, and according to my intake, they have six children in the home,” answered the CPS worker, who identified herself to the dispatcher as Amanda Krotke. 
 
 Krotke told dispatch she’d already tried contacting the family herself. 
 
 “I’ve been to the home Monday and Friday and knocked on the door just this morning, and I can get no response,” Krotke said. “Different cars have been moving in and out, I noticed, so I feel like someone is there.” 
 
 The dispatcher then asks: “And what was the reason we are checking on them?” 
 
 “Concerns that the children aren’t being fed,” Krotke said. 
 
 Those troubling allegations followed the Harts wherever they moved, as police records and witness testimony paint a picture of parents accused of withholding food to their children as punishment. 
 
 Sarah Hart was convicted of misdemeanor domestic assault involving one of the children several years ago in Minnesota. 
 
 Meanwhile, the search for the three missing children is now in week two, with a promising, yet heartbreaking lead over the weekend: Police recovered the body of an African-American girl on Saturday. 
 
 Investigators said they won’t know if it’s one of the Hart girls until DNA analysis is complete. They said the process can take weeks. 
 
 Ten search and rescue individuals searched again for the family Monday. 
 
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 3/29: Search warrant served at home of Woodland family killed in California crash 
 
 3/28: Deputies ID family from Woodland killed in California crash; three children missing 
 
 Copyright 2018 KPTV-KPDX Broadcasting Corporation. All rights reserved. ||||| Washington officials have released a 911 call made by a child welfare worker who was attempting to reach the Hart family on the day their SUV was found on the bottom of a California cliff. 
 
 The call, made by a child welfare employee with the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services, came into the Clark County emergency dispatch center shortly after 10:30 a.m. on March 26 — the same day the Harts’ vehicle was found at the bottom of a 100-foot cliff off the Pacific Coast Highway in Northern California, according to KOIN6. 
 
 The employee told 911 dispatchers she had tried to contact the family multiple times but had been unsuccessful, so she was calling 911 to request a welfare check, the outlet reports. 
 
 “Who are we checking on?” the Clark County emergency dispatcher asks the worker. 
 
 “The mothers are Sarah and Jennifer Hart, and according to my intake, they have six children in the home,” the worker says on the call, KTPV reports. 
 
 “I’ve been to the home Monday and Friday and knocked on the door just this morning, and I can get no response,” the worker says. “Different cars have been moving in and out, I noticed, so I feel like someone is there.” 
 
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 When asked why she was checking on the children, the worker says the department received “concerns that the children aren’t being fed,” CBS News reports. 
 
 On March 26, five of the eight members of the Hart family — parents Jennifer and Sarah and three of their children — were discovered dead at the bottom of the cliff. 
 
 Authorities have also said that Devonte, 15, Hannah, 16, and Sierra Hart, 12, remain unaccounted for and are feared dead. 
 
 On Saturday, officials from the California Highway Patrol announced that a body had been found “in the surf” around Highway 1, an area which is “in the immediate vicinity of the recent Hart Family crash.” 
 
 The body found on Saturday “appears to be that of an African American Female but the age and a positive identity could not be determined,” states a press release from the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office. 
 
 An autopsy on the body is pending. 
 
 Mendocino Sheriff/Facebook 
 
 Three days before the crash was reported, Washington State Department of Social and Health Services received a call reporting that the six Hart children appeared to be “potential victims of alleged abuse or neglect,” Norah West, the department’s spokeswoman, previously told PEOPLE. 
 
 In 2011, Sarah pleaded guilty to an abuse charge, admitting to taking her daughter into the bathroom, bending her over the edge of the bathtub and hitting her on the backside. 
 
 Sarah was originally charged with domestic assault and malicious punishment, according to court records. She agreed to plead guilty to the domestic assault charge and the malicious punishment charge was dropped. 
 
 She was sentenced to 90 days in jail — which was stayed — and one year of supervised probation, according to court documents. 
 
 Sheriff: Crash Was a Crime and Not an Accident 
 
 Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman said on April 4 that he believes the crash was a crime and not an accident. 
 
 “I’m to the point where I no longer am calling this an accident; I’m calling it a crime,” Allman said during an appearance on HLN’s Crime & Justice with Ashleigh Banfield. 
 
 Previously, authorities cited information pulled from the vehicle’s software as evidence that the vehicle may have purposefully been driven off the cliff. 
 
 Capt. Greg Baarts with the California Highway Patrol’s Northern Division said the Harts’ SUV was stopped at a flat, dirt pull-off area before it sped off the steep rocky face and plunged down toward the water. 
 
 Baarts also cited the lack of skid marks near the cliff’s edge — indicating that the vehicle did not attempt to brake. 
 
 However, police have not discussed a possible motive or whether a link exists between the crash and child abuse allegations in the family’s past — including Sarah’s guilty plea. 
 
 The Dekalbs, a neighbor couple, have told local media that they reported the suspected abuse of the children, and said that when state workers knocked on the Harts’ door, the family was allegedly home but did not answer. 
 
 “The next morning when we saw that the vehicle was gone, and then Sunday morning when it still wasn’t there, we figured something was off,” Bruce Dekalb told TV station KGW.
– A social worker worried about the welfare of the Hart family called 911 in Washington state the same day the family's SUV plunged off a cliff in California. The Department of Social and Health Services employee told dispatchers in the March 26 call that she was requesting a welfare check after repeated failed attempts to locate Jennifer and Sarah Hart and their six adopted children, People reports. "I've been to the home Monday and Friday and knocked on the door just this morning, and I can get no response," the worker said. "Different cars have been moving in and out, I noticed, so I feel like someone is there." The worker said she was worried about the family because of "concerns the children aren't being fed," reports KPTV. The couple and at least three of the children—Markis, 19; Jeremiah, 14; and Abigail, 14— died in what investigators believe was an intentional crash. Three other children—Devonte, 15; Hannah, 16; and Sierra, 12—are missing and presumed dead. The Harts were being investigated for alleged child abuse and neglect, which mystifies friends who knew them in the mid-2000s, when they lived in Minnesota, reports the Seattle Times. "They were passionate about trying to help," says Kayla Schmitz, who worked with the couple at Herberger's department store when they first got their foster-care license. "The people I know wouldn't starve their kids and lock them up." (An autopsy is being carried out on an unidentified body found near the crash site.)