Father’s N.H. trial pushed to February
A New Hampshire judge on Thursday set a new trial date for Adam Montgomery, the former Manchester man charged with murdering his 5-year-old daughter Harmony Montgomery in 2019, with jury selection scheduled to begin in February.
Montgomery, 33, did not appear during the brief hearing in Hillsborough Superior Court, where Judge Amy B. Messer moved jury selection to Feb. 6 at the defense’s request. Prosecutors did not object.
The trial had been scheduled to start in November, but Montgomery’s lead public defender, Caroline Smith, asked for a continuance, citing the need for a new co-counsel after another defense lawyer on the case took a different job, WMUR-TV reported.
Montgomery, who has pleaded not guilty to charges stemming from Harmony’s death, was sentenced last month to serve decades in prison in a separate stolen guns case and said at the time that he loved his child “unconditionally” and did not kill her.
“I did not kill my daughter Harmony,” he said. “And I look forward to my upcoming trial to refute those offensive claims.”
In handing down the gun sentence, Messer said she was not considering the pending murder case, only the gun and armed career criminal charges Montgomery was convicted of and his “egregious” history of violence.
Messer sentenced Montgomery to serve between 15 and 30 years on each of two armed career criminal counts, with the prison terms to be completed consecutively.
In June, a jury convicted Montgomery after hearing testimony from his estranged wife, Kayla Montgomery, who described how he stole a shotgun and a rifle from an acquaintance in Manchester, N.H., in 2019.
In the murder case, prosecutors allege Montgomery repeatedly struck his daughter “in the head with a closed fist” on or around Dec. 7, 2019. Harmony’s body has not been found.
Adam Montgomery was initially arrested in January 2022 on charges of assaulting Harmony and endangering her welfare in Manchester, where she had been living with him, her stepmother, and the couple’s other children.
In May 2022, the Massachusetts Office of the Child Advocate released a report that documented failures by the state’s child welfare agency and the juvenile court to safeguard Harmony’s well-being and offered a host of recommendations to prevent similar failings.
In February 2019, a Massachusetts juvenile court judge placed Harmony in her father’s care although he had pleaded guilty five years earlier to shooting a man in the head during a drug deal in Haverhill.
The judge, Mark Newman, made his decision over the objection of a lawyer for the state’s Department of Children and Families and without requiring a mandated assessment of his suitability to care for the girl, the report said.
In February 2022, a separate report found that child welfare workers in New Hampshire repeatedly checked in on Montgomery’s home after Harmony vanished but did little to determine her whereabouts or verify her father’s claim that she was living in Massachusetts with her mother, Crystal Sorey, who at the time didn’t have custody.
Harmony was placed in state custody when she was 2 months old because child welfare workers were concerned about Sorey’s struggle with substance use disorder.
Between August 2014 and January 2018, DCF removed Harmony from her mother’s care three times and placed her in the custody of foster parents, the child advocate’s report said.