New Hampshire agreed in May 2025 to pay $2.25 million to Crystal Sorey to resolve the Harmony Montgomery wrongful death settlement, closing a civil case that accused the state’s Division for Children, Youth and Families (DCYF) of ignoring warning signs before Harmony’s father beat her to death in December 2019. The state admitted no wrongdoing. Attorney General John Formella said the agreement was reached “to avoid prolonged litigation and support closure for the families.”
Harmony was five years old. Her remains have never been found.
How Harmony Ended Up in Her Father’s Custody
Harmony was born in Massachusetts in June 2014 with medical issues that included blindness in one eye. Her mother was struggling with substance abuse, her father was in prison, and Harmony was taken into state custody within months. She cycled through foster placements for years.
In February 2019, a Massachusetts juvenile court judge granted Adam Montgomery sole custody, and Harmony moved to New Hampshire to live with him. The transfer went forward without a completed Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children, the protocol meant to protect children placed across state lines. A later investigation by the Massachusetts Office of the Child Advocate found that the judge was never shown Adam Montgomery’s violent criminal record, and no transition plan was put in place, even though Harmony had spent only about 40 hours with her father across 20 supervised visits over her first four and a half years.
That record was long. It included teenage charges for possessing a dangerous weapon on school grounds, later convictions for burglary, criminal threatening with a knife, stabbing a youth and pushing him from a moving vehicle, and armed robbery at gunpoint. In 2014, he pleaded guilty to shooting a man in the head in Haverhill, Massachusetts, and served eighteen months. Massachusetts child advocate Maria Mossaides said afterward that “there was no information presented to the court about Adam Montgomery’s violent history.”
What DCYF Did and Didn’t Do
The wrongful death lawsuit built its negligence claim on what happened after Harmony arrived in New Hampshire. The case was assigned to child protective services worker Demetrios Tsaros, who had previously been Adam Montgomery’s youth counselor at the Sununu Youth Services Center. Tsaros reportedly told the family he should not have been assigned to the case, and when concerns were raised about Adam’s heroin use, he brushed them aside by saying he knew Adam was “not like this.”
In July 2019, Adam Montgomery’s uncle, Kevin Montgomery, reported that Harmony had a severe black eye with bruising spreading to her nose and temple. He told the agency, “This is why children die,” describing the child as having been “punched clear in the eye socket with full force.” A DCYF worker responded by questioning the timing of the observation.
Tsaros was required to conduct a face-to-face interview with Harmony within 24 hours. He didn’t. He watched her from a distance as she left the home with her father, then reported the observation to Manchester Police as face-to-face. When he finally saw her nine days later, on August 7, he noted redness and faded bruising around the eye but accepted Adam Montgomery’s explanation that a toy lightsaber had caused it. He interviewed the child with the alleged abuser in the room, contrary to agency policy requiring a private setting, and never asked either of them about the specific allegations, which included reports that Adam had “beat the dog shit out of her,” forced her to scrub the bathroom with a toothbrush, and kept her isolated in her room for hours.
After finding drug paraphernalia in the home, Tsaros emailed Manchester Police: “I think you folks are all set. I saw the children and did not observe any bruises, marks, etc.” Additional reports that arrived in late July and early August, adding new allegations of physical abuse and sexual molestation, were logged as supplemental information rather than screened as new assessments. That reclassification skipped requirements for additional home visits and law enforcement notification. Tsaros also documented that a doctor had confirmed the children were medically up to date; it was later determined the doctor had never actually seen Harmony as a patient.
On October 17, 2019, Tsaros closed the investigation as “unfounded.” Harmony was killed less than two months later, on December 7, 2019, according to prosecutors, who said Adam Montgomery then spent three months moving her body before disposing of it in March 2020. Her disappearance was not reported until December 31, 2021, when Manchester Police announced a missing persons investigation. On August 11, 2022, the New Hampshire Attorney General confirmed she had been murdered in 2019.
Tsaros himself had a troubled employment history with the state. He resigned from a hospital campus police position in 2001 after a domestic violence incident and surrendered his police certification. In 2002, he was fired from the Sununu Youth Services Center after an investigation into sexual harassment complaints from a female coworker. He was later hired as a child protective services worker with DCYF in 2011 and left state employment in September 2021.
Terms of the Settlement
Crystal Sorey filed her wrongful death lawsuit against the state in September 2024 in Hillsborough County Superior Court, Northern District, alleging that DCYF’s negligence and systemic failures directly caused Harmony’s suffering and death. The May 2025 settlement paid Sorey $2.25 million. Under its terms, the state admitted no wrongdoing or unlawful conduct, and Sorey agreed to withdraw the lawsuit and release the state from further liability.
Sorey filed a separate wrongful death action against Adam Montgomery personally in July 2025. He did not respond, and on May 6, 2026, Judge Michael A. Klass entered a default judgment of roughly $15.5 million against him: $10 million in non-economic damages, about $3 million for economic loss, and $2.5 million in enhanced compensatory damages for what the court called “wanton, malicious, and oppressive conduct.” Given Montgomery’s incarceration, Sorey is not expected to collect much of it.
Other DCYF Wrongful Death Settlements
The Harmony Montgomery payout is one of three settlements totaling more than $10 million that the New Hampshire Attorney General’s office has reached since mid-2024 in cases involving children who died while under DCYF oversight. The state denied wrongdoing in all three.
- In June 2024, the state paid $5.75 million in the death of five-year-old Dennis Vaughan Jr., who died on Christmas Eve 2019 from blunt force trauma to his head and neck. DCYF had placed him and his siblings with their maternal grandmother, Sherry Connor, despite reports of alcohol abuse. The agency received at least 27 reports of suspected abuse and neglect before the boy’s death. Connor was arrested for murder in August 2024. The settlement went to Dennis’s mother, Danielle Vaughan, to be split with her surviving children.
- In December 2024, the state paid $2.25 million in the death of five-year-old Elijah Lewis, found dead in October 2021 from abuse and neglect. His mother, Danielle Dauphinais, was sentenced to more than 50 years in prison for second-degree murder. The lawsuit alleged DCYF accepted her claim that Elijah was living with relatives without ever contacting those relatives. The settlement went to his father, Timothy Lewis, with 70 percent placed in trust for Elijah’s half-siblings.
What Changed at DCYF
The case prompted policy changes in both states. New Hampshire’s DCYF now requires caseworkers to conduct physical body checks on children when investigating physical abuse allegations, rather than relying on visual observation from a distance. In 2023, New Hampshire and Massachusetts finalized a placement agreement setting mandatory deadlines for exchanging information about children crossing state lines. New Hampshire also began replacing its outdated “Bridges” case management system, cut caseworker assessment loads from roughly 90 per worker down to 16, and added supervisory staff at the Manchester district office.
The Massachusetts Office of the Child Advocate released a 101-page investigative report in May 2022 finding that the state’s child welfare system had failed to hold Harmony’s wellbeing on “equal footing” with her parents’ rights. The report faulted the Department of Children and Families for focusing almost entirely on the mother while failing to properly assess the father, and criticized attorneys on both sides for not effectively presenting Harmony’s needs and vulnerabilities to the judge who awarded custody.
The New Hampshire Office of the Child Advocate, an independent watchdog created in 2018, called the case “groundbreaking for New Hampshire” and said it forced “difficult but necessary conversations about the importance of child protection, accountability and overall systemic reform.”