Harmony Montgomery (L) and Adam Montgomery (R) appear in images released by the Manchester, N.H. Police Department.
The father of a missing 7-year-old New England girl is a suspect in a Massachusetts murder, according to several local news reports.
The missing girl, Harmony Montgomery, has not been seen since December 2019, as Law&Crime has previously noted. Her high-profile disappearance is under investigation by police and state child welfare agencies in New Hampshire and Massachusetts where she from time to time lived.
Kayla Montgomery, 31, the missing girl’s stepmother, is charged with welfare fraud for allegedly collecting food stamps in the missing girl’s name. Adam Michael Montgomery, also 31, is the missing girl’s father and custodial parent. He is charged with second-degree assault, one count of interference with custody, and two counts of endangering the welfare of a child in connection with his alleged treatment of Harmony. Adam Montgomery is reportedly estranged from Kayla Montgomery.
“I bashed her around this house,” Adam Montgomery allegedly told Kevin Montgomery, his uncle, with regards to Harmony.
Harmony Montgomery holds a doll in an image released by the Manchester, N.H. Police Department.
Boston FOX affiliate WFXT reported on Wednesday that Adam Montgomery is also a suspect in the “unsolved” Lynn, Mass. murder of victim Darlin Guzman on Feb. 10, 2008. The television station’s report is cited to an unnamed but “knowledgeable law enforcement source.”
Guzman was shot in the chest just before 11 p.m. on that Sunday night nearly 14 years ago in the parking lot of a convenience store in Austin Square — a location about two miles west of the city’s nominal downtown area.
The locals have long repeated a corrosive poem about the north-of-Boston municipality — “Lynn, Lynn, city of sin . . . you never come out the way you went in” — but the coastal city has been attempting a turnabout as of late.
According to WFXT’s story, the Lynn Police Department in 2008 described a suspect in Guzman’s killing “suspect as a light-skinned man in his twenties, about six feet tall, wearing a red hooded sweatshirt.” The man is said to have fled the scene in a red Honda Accord toward Saugus, another North Shore community due west of Lynn.
The television station’s report by longtime area crime reporter Bob Ward indicated that Montgomery and “two members of his family” were at the center of the investigation “almost since day one.”
Law enforcement sources said the victim’s car turned up in a cul-de-sac in Billerica, Mass., on the way to Bedford, N.H., where the Montgomery family — including Adam — was living at the time.
Harmony and Adam Montgomery appear in an image obtained by WFXT-TV.
No one was been charged with killing Guzman. WFXT’s report noted that police in Manchester, N.H., where Adam Montgomery remains incarcerated, are aware that the Lynn, Mass. police department is interested in the inmate.
The Boston Globe has subsequently also reported that Montgomery is a “suspect” in the Guzman killing.
An online obituary says Guzman was 28. He was born in the Dominican Republic but had lived in the United States for 13 years. He worked as a computer technician and left behind three children. The obituary says his body was returned to the Dominican Republic for burial.
WFXT’s report says Adam Montgomery and “two members of his family” are believed by law enforcement to have “interacted with Guzman” before he was shot. They all “agreed to meet up” at the convenience store where Guzman was gunned down, the report says.
Despite what the Globe called Adam Montgomery’s “extensive criminal record,” a Massachusetts judge granted the father custody of Harmony.
Harmony Montgomery appears in a picture released by the Manchester, N.H. Police Department.
The courts, the police, and child welfare agencies in both the Bay State and the Granite State have crossed paths with the primary persons of interest in the case many times over the years. The cross-border nature of the people and the investigations has resulted in a typical spat of finger-pointing between the frequently-at-odds yet conjoined bodies politic of those states. The liberal, large, erudite, and wealthy Bay State and the traditionally conservative and comparably stoic Granite State to its north have rarely seen eye to eye on core matters of politics and policy; still, the neighboring New England empires share strong economic ties, and New Hampshire courts are known to consider Massachusetts case law highly persuasive when the Granite State’s own statutes need interpretation on novel issues.
New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu (R) has ordered routine investigations by state agencies under his purview in an attempt to ascertain when the missing girl’s path crossed with state child welfare authorities. In response to Law&Crime requests, the New Hampshire Division for Children, Youth and Families has said that most or all of its data on the missing girl must remain private due to federal and state confidentiality laws.