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While detectives from Clark County, Washington, found a cat, chickens and chicks abandoned at Woodland House, the dogs were never found.
But Slates testified that he did not think the couple knew what they would do when they left for Mendocino County, a place where friends said they often talked about wanting to visit.
On March 25, after waiting in front of the Fort Bragg Dollar Tree where she was captured on video surveillance, Jennifer Hart bought various personal care items, including two packages of toothbrushes, a deodorant, socks, a mask, sleep and a hairbrush.
According to Slates, their purchases suggest that even at that time, Hart mothers were not yet engaged in what they would do later.
At one point, driving around the coast and visiting Gulch National Park, ignoring the calls and texting of his friends, seems to have been resolved, he said.
After talking with several of their friends, Slates said that he thought that "both decided that it would be the end … that if they could not have these kids, nobody would have them. "
In his detailed testimony Thursday morning, PSC officer Timothy Roloff, a member of his agency's North Division Multidisciplinary Accident Investigation Team, said data from a computer module taken from inside The family's SUV transmitted information about his movements up to eight seconds before the crash.
He indicated that the vehicle was at a standstill, with the brakes on, a few seconds before the driver started to accelerate from 3 to 20 mph in the space of three seconds, the throttle being 100% open at the third second and the vehicle probably going in the air at the fourth second.
The vehicle was about 50 feet from the edge of the cliff and should have crossed an 18-inch berm about 12 feet wide before collapsing to the rocks. The six children were ejected from the back seat where they were sitting.
Hart's moms were found in the vehicle, but Jennifer Hart's body slipped as the car was being raked on the side of the cliff.
The MAIT team determined that none of the family members were wearing seatbelts, although Jennifer Hart was a "known seatbelt Nazi," Slates said. A pathologist who performed autopsies on five family members said Wednesday that Jennifer Hart had external abrasions compatible with a shoulder belt.
Slates said Hart mothers used antihistamines like Benadryl, containing an active ingredient called diphenhydramine, to help their children sleep in the car while on the move. The investigators found that the drugs, in liquid and tablet form, had been purchased from Walmart in the car.
But levels found in bloodstream bodies in the wreckage were extreme enough to require multiple doses, said Slates.
Markis Hart should have taken 19.2 units of dosage; Abigail Hart, 14 doses; Jeremiah Hart, 8.8 doses; and Sarah Hart, 42 doses, he said.
"The children were more than likely unconscious or asleep," Slates said. Sarah Hart "would have been extremely intoxicated at that time."
Editor Mary Callahan can be reached at 707-521-5249 or [email protected].
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