Making of a Tragedy

Not long after he and Jacks met at the beauty academy, they moved in together. Their daughter N'Kiah was born in 2002, and Aja arrived a year later.

Jacks brought both newborns to the school to show them off. "Just like a mom," Lynch said. "She loved those kids." And it seemed that whenever Lynch ran into Jacks away from the academy, Jacks had her daughters with her. "We used to joke with her: 'You're going to have a whole cheerleading squad,' " he said.

After taking a break from school while she was pregnant with N'Kiah, and then again with Aja, Jacks returned, Lynch said, and obtained a cosmetology license after graduating in 2005.

"For someone to come back twice," Lynch said, "that says she was determined."

But her prospects soon dimmed, before extinguishing entirely.

Falling Into Downward Spiral

Tywana Richardson of District Heights, godmother to N'Kiah and Aja, said that Jacks, despite having a cosmetology license, did not go to work, and relied on Fogle for support. "She wasn't the type of person who hung around with a lot of people," said Richardson, a longtime friend of Fogle's. "I know she had friends and family, but she was more of a homebody. She was not out on the streets or anything."

By 2005, Jacks withdrew Brittany and Tatianna from Charles schools and moved to the District with Fogle. On Dec. 6, 2005, listing Fogle as her spouse and an address on Third Street NW as their home, Jacks applied for housing assistance.

A week later, though, the family apparently had no home. City officials said Jacks, Fogle and the four girls moved into the D.C. General Hospital's hypothermia shelter Dec. 14, 2005, and stayed for four months. While there, the couple applied for public assistance and enrolled the older children in District schools -- Brittany at Eastern High, Tatianna at Watkins Elementary.

At a news conference Friday, officials said that five D.C. government agencies had contact with Banita Jacks while she and her daughters lived a chaotic, often squalid existence in the city. But the agencies failed to aggressively follow up and turn matters around.

In July 2006, three months after the family left the shelter, officials said, a nurse at George Washington University Hospital phoned the city's Child and Family Services Agency and spoke with a hotline call-taker. Fogle, a patient at the hospital, had checked himself out, and the nurse was concerned that Fogle and Jacks had substance abuse problems. Jacks also told the Pretrial Services Agency last week that she had used drugs; no details were provided, and it is unclear how far back any drug history goes.

The nurse told the call-taker that the family was living in a van, officials said. Fogle at the time was suffering from nasal cancer that had spread to other parts of his body.

The downward spiral continued in the fall of 2006, as the city terminated the family's food stamp benefits for "failure to provide requested information," officials said.