What We Know
Since this is an on going case the information in this article my not be up to date
A Mother’s Long Road
Crystal Sorey has been walking a long and difficult road due to addiction, which ultimately cost her the custody of two children.
Now living sober, she is ready to rebuild her life. But there is a piece of her past — and her heart — that she’s been trying to recover in a desperate drama that recently became public — after Manchester Police became involved.
Her oldest child, 7-year-old Harmony Montgomery, is missing. She has been “lost” to a system that allowed the child’s father, Adam Montgomery, to have full custody — even though his past includes court documented incidents of violence, drug use and sales, and two prison sentences, including an 18-month sentence for shooting a man in the head during a drug deal gone wrong in 2014, the same year Harmony was born.
Harmony is a 7-year-old girl described as 4 feet tall, weighing about 50 pounds, with blond hair, and blue eyes. She is legally blind in her right eye and wears eyeglasses. According to those who knew her Harmony could light up a room with her smile. She was a good kid with lots of love in her heart.
Since losing custody of her children and regaining her sobriety, Crystal had unsuccessfully tried to locate Montgomery and reconnect with Harmony. The last time she saw Harmony was Easter 2019 during a Facetime visit. She showed her daughter an Easter basket she had waiting for her.
“It was a Minnie Mouse basket. I held onto it for a year. That was the last time I laid eyes on her,” Crystal said.
After the call, she claims that Harmony’s father cut ties between Harmony and Crystal’s family, prompting Crystal to begin calling police and child welfare services for help. But according to Crystal those cries for help went unanswered.
Family members followed every lead they had and have made “more than 80 calls” to child and youth protective services both in Massachusetts and New Hampshire (where Harmony’s her father supposedly lived), but no one followed up with her. Crystal even drove by homes associated with Harmony’s father but was unsuccessful in locating her.
Where’s Adam?
On November 18, 2021, Crystal was getting desperate since no one was helping her. So she sent an email communication to Mayor Joyce Craig’s office asking for help. In the email she stated “Please, I’m begging for help in finding my daughter before she ends up like that little boy that just passed away,” Crystal said. The boy Crystal referred to is Merrimack 5-year-old Elijah Lewis, who was found dead in October in Massachusetts.
Also in that communication she said she was prepared to go to the media with her story if no one could help her. Within hours a detective from Manchester Police contacted her and said they were looking into Harmony’s whereabouts. Within 24 hours she heard from a “Supervisor O’Brien” from NH Division of Children, Youth and Families, who told her they were investigating.
This launched a search for Adam Montgomery, going to the addresses they had for him and when they couldn’t find them, they referred the case to DCYF. It was 39 days after that, that DCYF notified police they couldn’t find Harmony.
On December 31, 2021 Manchester police announce they received a report that Harmony Montgomery has not been seen since late 2019. “The circumstances surrounding this prolonged absence are very concerning and are being thoroughly investigated,” the department said in a statement.
The last time Harmony was seen by people other than her mother was during a Manchester police call for service in October of 2019 at a home in the city. They said they had no reason to return to the address after that.
“That’s the last time she has been seen here in the City of Manchester. I’m not saying she hasn’t been seen somewhere else. I’m just focusing on the last time she was seen in the City of Manchester,” Police Chief Allen Aldenberg said.
If you are doing the math it had been 2 years since anyone has seen Harmony.
“For us to have a two year delay, that is extremely concerning. That’s not something that happens to us on a regular basis. It doesn’t happen every day” said Aldenberg.
Police were able to located and arrest Adam Montgomery, who is charged with child endangerment for an incident of abuse reported by one of his relatives dating back to July of 2019. Also arrested was Kayla Montgomery, charged with Welfare fraud after a review of records found that she had been collecting food stamps for Harmony beginning in February of 2019, and which she continued to receive even after she claimed that Harmony was returned to Crystal around Thanksgiving of 2019. (Update: the charges against Kayla have been dropped)
The House
Manchester Police returned to the address where Harmony was last known to live with Adam and Kayla Montgomery, 77 Gilford St., on the city’s West Side. Although police had searched the property on Jan. 2, 2022 they returned on January 8 and remained there on Jan. 9.
At the time of this recording police hadn’t released any information as to what they have found or were searching for at this location. However, two men were observed at the scene appearing to assist the police. The logo on their clothing read Hager GeoScience, a Woburn, Mass., company that, according to the company website, indicates it specializes in using equipment to map and find voids in concrete slabs or the ground.
It’s assumed that authorities were using ground penetrating technology to possibly look for human remains. However, that hasn’t been confirmed.
Detectives from Manchester police were seen removing a large paper bag, sometimes used to secure evidence. The bag was removed from the area of the search and placed into a police vehicle. Several large tarps were brought to the scene January 8th in a pickup truck. Police unloaded the large tarps and brought them to the side of the house just before sunset.
On January 9th the tarps could be seen placed over the backyard. A trailer was parked in the driveway, the markings on the trailer indicate it is used to warm the ground. The trailer combined with the tarps is often used at construction sites in the winter months to thaw the ground so that crews can work and remove soil.
The street was not blocked off by police, and as the rain came down there was no activity outside of the house. Crime scene tape could be seen extending from each corner of the house, securing the backyard.
As a second search at the Gilford Street residence was underway on January 8th, Crystal and about a dozen friends and supporters gathered at Pine Island Park in Manchester, not far from the Gilford Street residence. Several media outlets were on hand and Crystal spoke openly about her struggles and her search for her daughter. They recalled how much Harmony loved feeding the ducks, which brought some laughter. They prayed for Harmony’s return, through tears.
Red Flags
Before Harmony disappeared there seemed to be some red flags around Adam that were ignored.
Crystal explained that in 2018 she “slipped up” and went into another drug recovery program in Lowell, Mass. Harmony was 4 and her younger brother Jamison, about 18 months old when she was told they would not reunify her with her children. She lost custody of both children to the state of Massachusetts. Both children were placed in foster care. Eight months later, full custody of Harmony was granted to Adam Montgomery, who was married to Kayla Montgomery with whom he had three children. Jamison, who has a different father, became eligible for adoption and was adopted in November of 2019.
Crystal said that when she learned Montgomery had been given custody in February of 2019, she immediately tried to intervene on Harmony’s behalf, questioning the rationale for placing Harmony with her father, who had been in and out of trouble with the law since he was a teenager.
“I told DCYF a million times it was not a good idea. I knew something would happen. Nobody listened to me. I told them this man shouldn’t have her. He’s short-tempered with her. He had a short temper with me. He was very controlling, he was controlling with me and I knew with Harmony being his first-born, he had some kind of spite over me. His own blood family said the same thing — ‘Did you even look at his record?’ No. He barely went to visits. He barely tried.”
According to court records, Montgomery was 17 in 2007 when he was arrested and charged with criminal threatening in Bedford, where he lived at the time, for pointing a knife at a girl and calling her a “little bitch.”
In 2008, when he still was 17, he was indicted in Hillsborough County Superior Court Northern Division on first-degree assault and reckless conduct involving the alleged sale of Percocet. According to court records, he was accused of stabbing a youth in the thigh and tossing him out of a moving vehicle in Manchester. Both the first-degree assault and reckless conduct charges were nol-prossed. He pleaded guilty to criminal threatening and a probation violation and ended up serving 383 days, the amount of time he was held pre-trial.
Six years later, in March 2014, when he was 24 — three months before Harmony’s birth — Montgomery was arrested in Haverhill, Mass., accused of shooting a man in the head during a January 24, 2014 incident. Montgomery was outside the victim’s apartment, according to an application for a criminal complaint. Montgomery was there to buy three grams of heroin, but instead “pointed a gun at the victim’s head to rob the victim of the heroin,” the document claimed.
“The victim swatted the gun away and the defendant fired the gun and shot the victim in the face,” the record continues. The other person, whose identity is being withheld by Fox News, survived the shooting.
He was charged with armed robbery, armed assault to murder, carrying a firearm without a license and discharging a firearm within 500 feet of a building. He ultimately pleaded guilty to the charges and was sentenced to 18 months in the house of corrections.
Even during the last Facetime call made to Harmony, Crystal says Montgomery appeared to be intimidating the child and muting the conversation to try and control what Harmony relayed to her mother.
“He never wanted to do any kind of co-parenting for her, it was always about what he could get out of having her,” Crystal said. “It was never for her. It was always out of spite,” Crystal said.
She said her daughter was visibly shaking.
Cracks In The System
When contacted by the press for more information, the Office of the Child Advocate in Massachusetts referred reporters to Massachusetts Department of Children & Families. Calls made to that office and the NH Office of the Child Advocate have not been returned. However, both NH and Mass. DCYF have previously said they are barred by federal and state law from commenting about a child’s case.
Crystal wants answers. She wants resolution; she wants Harmony back.
“We’re never giving up,” Crystal said. “We’re gonna bring her home. We’re never going to stop.”
So how was a desperate mother who’s child has been missing for two years get ignored by those who are in charge of protecting kids?
The case has attracted widespread attention and increased scrutiny of the state’s Division for Children, Youth and Families. After more than two years in which Harmony’s disappearance was not known to authorities, recently there have been multiple developments in the effort to find her which have also exposed some big cracks in the system.
For one, Harmony had been enrolled in Manchester schools in 2019, which was right around the same time she was reunited with her father. Typically an adult in the school system could have picked up on signs that there were issues.
But due to school closures and other coronavirus precautions it was easy to hide out, according to Betsy Brantner Smith, a spokesperson for the National Police Association and retired sergeant whose 29-year career included investigating crimes against children in Illinois.
“COVID and the lockdowns were likely very unhelpful in this situation,” she told Fox News Digital. “This is one of the reasons that school shutdowns are so dangerous for children, because very often, school is the only place for a child to be safe.”
In some circumstances, it may be the only time an at-risk child is ever around a responsible adult, Brantner Smith added, like a teacher, guidance counselor or other district employee. And resources for state agencies are scant and stretched thin.
Brantner Smith said local police departments should be given more investigative authority over some of these cases, noting that shortly after Manchester police joined the search for Harmony, the adults who were supposed to be taking care of her were behind bars.
“These cases are horrific to think about,” Brantner Smith said. “But American law enforcement is ready to deal with it. We want to deal with it. We want to stop it, and we want to protect our children. But there are some very, very broken systems in this country.”
Callahan Walsh, spokesperson for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, said coronavirus shutdowns could have made it easy for an abusive parent to lay low.
“With corona and with lockdowns, it’s been kind of easy for people to sort of just hide out, keep a low profile, stay under the radar,” said Walsh, who is also the co-host of “In Pursuit with John Walsh,” streaming on Discovery+.
He said the fact no other family members reported her missing may have been a “bystander effect.”
“Everybody thought she was safe and assumed somebody had seen her, but in reality nobody had seen her for two years,” he said.
In general, but especially if children are out of school, everyday Americans should look out for warning signs, Walsh said.
“Children are our most precious commodity, and there are some evil people out there that harm kids,” he said. “If you suspect any sort of foul play or bad behavior, absolutely report it. Children are so vulnerable.”
Harmony Needs Your Help
Like Manchester Police Chief Allen Aldenberg, who called on the public to “do the right thing” and come forward with information about Harmony’s whereabouts last week, Walsh said people should go to bat for at-risk children.
“Do the right thing — call on behalf of that child,” Walsh said. “Because at that point, that child has no voice. You need to be that voice.”
There is a reward out for information leading to Harmony’s location which is not at $104,000. They have also set up a dedicated tip line at 603–203–6060 for the 7-year-old.
Since this is an on going investigation information is constantly being updated. At the time of this recording a report came out stating that authorities are considering that Harmony could be in another state.
“I can’t just focus on Manchester, New Hampshire for this investigation,” said Manchester Police Chief Allen Aldenberg during a news conference Wednesday. “As broad of a net as we can cast, that’s what we intend to do.”
Aldenberg also noted there are billboards in other states.
At the same press conference police said they have received over 300 tips related to the case. However, at this time none of the leads have lead to locating Harmony.
I of course will be keeping an eye on any further developments and hopefully the next time I talk about this case it will be to report that they have found Harmony, safe and happy. Again the number for the tip line is 603–203–6060. If you have information please call.
