Just about everyone has seen the picture of young Devonte Hart weeping and hugging a policeman at a November 2014 Black Lives Matter rally in Portland. Most of those people also know what came earlier this year: Devonte, his adoptive parents and five siblings apparently all died in what authorities believe was a deliberate car wreck in California late last month.

Since then we’ve learned that life in the Hart household was not all sunshine and roses, so much so that child welfare officials investigated the family in the three states in which they lived. In reality, the six adopted children of Jennifer and Sarah Hart were the victims of mistakes just about everywhere they lived, and officials in one state had no easy way to uncover reports of problems in another.

They should. There needs to be a national registry of child abuse investigations.

Among other difficulties in the Hart family, in Minnesota, the children were pulled from public school after teachers contacted child welfare workers about bruises on them. In Oregon, they apparently never registered for school nor with the Clackamas Education Service District, which tracks the progress of home-schooled children in the area. That left them isolated from teachers and others who might have reported continuing problems.

In March 2013 police in West Linn responded to a complaint about the family but lacked evidence to do anything but interview the children and tell child welfare officials they suspected that the children they spoke with had been coached. Oregon workers were unaware of the earlier complaints in Minnesota and had no legal reason to go further. Oregon officials had no direct way to look into the family’s history in Minnesota, including the fact that Sarah Hart had pleaded guilty to striking one of the children.

The photo of Devonte Hart and the policeman was published in November 2014, more than a year after the Oregon complaint.

Last year the family moved to Washington state to avoid publicity in the wake of that photo’s widespread publication. In November 2017, new neighbors filed new complaints, and by March 23 Washington child welfare officials made the first of at least three attempts to contact the family. On March 26 the parents and three of the six children were found dead; the others are still missing.

Like their counterparts in Oregon, Washington officials had no direct access to records elsewhere. There is no national registry of child abuse investigations that would make access possible. Had such a registry been in place, it’s at least possible the Hart family, including all six children, might be alive today.