New Hampshire social workers ignored a litany of warning signs that a 5-year-old girl was being physically abused by her father prior to the child’s death, the slain girl’s mother alleged in a negligence lawsuit filed Friday against the state.
Crystal Sorey says the state’s Division for Children, Youth and Families failed to act on numerous reports from multiple people about Harmony Montgomery’s welfare after father Adam Montgomery was awarded custody of the girl in February 2019.
Adam Montgomery was sentenced in May to a minimum of 56 years in prison after he was convicted of murdering his daughter and moving her corpse around for months before disposing of it. Police believe Harmony was killed by him nearly two years before she was reported missing in 2021. Her body was never found.
According to the lawsuit, the father’s uncle Kevin Montgomery contacted the agency to tell them Harmony had a “vibrant” black eye after she was “punched clear in the eye socket with full force” and that Adam had told him he’d “bounced her off” every wall in the house.
What the actual fuck.
The couple later discovered the girl was dead after the car broke down, Kayla Montgomery testified. She said her husband put the body in a duffel bag. She described various places where the girl’s body was hidden, including the trunk of a car, a cooler, a homeless center ceiling vent and the walk-in freezer at her husband’s workplace.
So this guy was toting a child-corpse around and hiding her in places where others simply didn’t notice? I wanted more info on the step-mother. Is she in prison for complicity in the scheme? I gotta think so.
Followed a link in the article to her testimony:
Kayla Montgomery said Harmony was potty trained, but had begun having frequent accidents. She testified that her husband punched Harmony in the head after two such accidents in the car.
He later covered Harmony with a blanket as the child cried, moaned and eventually went silent, the stepmother said. Their car broke down soon afterward and Adam Montgomery put Harmony’s body in the duffel bag, she said.
[…]
“Right,” said Montgomery, who is serving an 18-month prison sentence after pleading guilty to perjury for lying during grand jury testimony about where she was when Harmony was last seen.
[…]
The duffel bag made it from the trunk of a friend’s car to a hallway cooler near an apartment where Kayla Montgomery’s mother lived, and then to a ceiling vent in a shelter where the family stayed for about six weeks.
I find it difficult to believe that a corpse spent six weeks in a ceiling without detection, but there’s no reason to believe that she’s lying about this child dying from abuse. If anything, I think the step-mother may share more guilt in hiding the body. But I guess prosecutors weighed his conviction as the most important aspect of the case.
We live in such a fucked up society.
What did this mother do to lose a custody battle to this piece of shit? Was foster care not the better option here?? Fuck.
Maybe it was something as simple as dad made more money than mom did.
Blaming a victim probably isn’t the best choice here.
Which victim did I blame?
There is one victim here. Pretty sure I didn’t blame the dead child.
The wife is a victim as well as she lost her child.
Or do you think that a parent losing their child to murder doesn’t have any effect on them whatsoever?
I think without knowing why she lost the child, it’s not right to call her a victim before the child. For all you know, she was worse than him. Which, stands to reason.
Until I know, there is one victim. Your stance is conjecture. Mine is withholding judgement with reason. I won’t go into gender politics of custody and why there are red flags to begin with here; until we know why she lost custody to this (now) clear piece of shit and not to foster care…
There is one victim (dead child). And one culprit (the state).
Should the mother have been a decent mother, drug addicted but loving and providing, not abusive, etc, the there are two victims, and two counts against the state.
I am not going to jump to conclusions, especially when the available evidence (the fact that she lost custody to a deadbeat lunatic) suggests otherwise.
The mother could equally be a perpetrator or a victim. We don’t know yet.
I am not going to jump to conclusions
You already did.
No, I have remained purposely impartial.
Protip, don’t try and become a lawyer.
We have no evidence to sway us between “mom was worse than dad” and “mom is a victim”. (In fact the available evidence suggests mom was so bad that dads psychopathic character didn’t shine through as less safe from Mom than foster care. I’ve been generous to Mom given this and, again, not going into gender politics of custody battles…).
I understand you’re trying to be empathetic. I’m trying to preserve justice for a tortured, dead child. Until we don’t know mom wasnt worse, we remain impartial.
You may be right, mom may be a victim. But you may be doing a dead child a severe disservice. Withhold your judgement without facts present, please.
Was Dad’s cousin the DA? that changes things. We dont know. And until we do, we examine the available evidence.
Until more evidence is presented publicly, mom is not a victim. That doesn’t mean she can’t be, and I have left that window open. On purpose.
The known victim is a dead child. We proceed with respect to known victims so as to remain impartial.
I used to be an investigator for a child and family services agency.
Please stop trying to tell me who is a victim and who isn’t.
As the father of a nearly 5 year old girl, reading this makes my blood boil. I would strangle this man with every ounce of strength in my body
How much do we want to bet that someone along the line looked the other way because they believe in being violent towards their kids?
You know, the “spare the rod…” sort. Those people still exist, unfortunately.
