Episode
Adam Montgomery Had 21 Criminal Cases — Why Did a Judge Give Him His Daughter?
- Published
- Jun 15, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1264
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- https://audioboom.com/posts/8916103
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Summary
Adam Montgomery had twenty-one criminal cases in New Hampshire alone when a Massachusetts juvenile court judge decided he was fit to raise a child. The Harmony Montgomery case began the moment Judge Mark Newman awarded sole custody of a five-year-old girl to a man whose record included a stabbing, a suspected homicide, and shooting another man in the face. The court moved so fast it didn’t wait for the required home study to be completed. Ten months after that ruling, Harmony was dead. Now the New Hampshire Supreme Court has reversed Montgomery’s murder conviction on procedural grounds — the latest in a chain of institutional failures that stretches across two states and seven years. The court found that trying the murder charge alongside a separate assault charge in one trial denied Montgomery a fair proceeding. The assault evidence was airtight. The murder evidence depended on a single witness with credibility problems. The strong case dragged the weak one across the finish line, and the Supreme Court sent it back. But the system failures started long before the courtroom. DCYF caseworker Demetrios Tsaros was assigned to investigate reports that Harmony was being harmed — despite having served as Adam Montgomery’s youth counselor fifteen years earlier. He visited the home, found it filthy, saw bruising around Harmony’s eye, never spoke to the girl, and emailed police that everything looked fine. Manchester police responded to the Montgomery residence sixteen times in a single year. Nobody pulled Harmony out. Tony Brueski breaks down how two states failed one child — from the custody decision to the killing to the conviction that was supposed to hold and didn’t. Montgomery still faces decades in prison. Harmony still has no grave. Links: Join Our SubStack For AD-FREE…