Harmony Montgomery was murdered by her father. These are all the systems that failed her
The storm of unfortunate events that led to a Massachusetts court awarding custody of Harmony Montgomery to her father would eventually prove fatal.
For the first four years of her life, Harmony’s childhood had been a lot like her little brother Jamison’s. They were born two years apart to a mother who was actively struggling with substance abuse issues and constantly found themselves in and out of foster homes.
“The trauma that they had been through at a very young age … All they really had was each other. Harmony was Jamison’s only constant,” Blair Miller, who adopted Jamison along with his husband Jonathon Bobbitt-Miller, tells The Independent.
Jamison officially became a Miller in November 2019 and a week later, the family gathered to celebrate the little boy’s birthday at their Boston home. That same weekend, just over 50 miles away in Manchester, New Hampshire, Harmony was killed. She was five years old.
“All I can think of is, ‘Gosh, we were celebrating Jamison’s birthday when Harmony was being beaten in the back of a car,” Mr Miller said.
The Millers had inquired about adopting Harmony, a rambunctious little girl with an infectious grin who was blind in her right eye, but were told that would not be possible. The Massachusetts Department of Children and Families (DCF) informed the family that Harmony had been reunited with her biological father, Adam Montgomery.
Montgomery was found guilty by a jury in late February of beating Harmony to death after she had a bathroom accident.
A constellation of missed warning signs, systemic failures, inconsistent laws across two states, and vague policies resulted in Harmony being placed in the hands of her father, who had a violent criminal history and was in jail at the time she was born.
“It was one decision after another that put her on a path of lethality with her father,” Carol Erskine, a Massachusetts child advocate, juvenile court judge, and author of an upcoming book about Harmonytold The Independent.
From June 2014, when DCF opened the case, to February 2019, when her father was awarded custody of Harmony, the DCF case management team never completed an assessment of him, the Massachusetts Office of the Child Advocate (OCA) noted.
Perhaps if a proper assessment of Adam Montgomery had been conducted, agencies would have noticed his lengthy criminal history, which includes everything from robbery to armed assault.
“There was just a list of dangerous crimes that made him a clear risk, in my opinion, to being able to parent their child,” Ms Erskine said.
The former judge explained that when determining the placement of a child, a judge will only consider a criminal past if the crimes are “relevant”. For example, “when there’s a record of ongoing unabated violence, with weapons and crimes against individuals, then it becomes more relevant in terms of parenting.”
Another red flag appears to have been ignored when deciding to award Harmony’s father custody: the lack of time he had spent with her during her life.
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