This week, a couple who attempted in vain to adopt a 5-year-old girl who had been given to her drug-using, ex-convict father, who is now accused of killing her, gave moving evidence to Massachusetts lawmakers.
“Today was difficult, but not nearly as difficult as the hell that Harmony endured every single day after Massachusetts handed her over to a murderer,” Johnathon Bobbitt-Miller told Fox News Digital after the hearing.
Harmony Montgomery’s half-brother Jamison had already been adopted by Bobbitt-Miller and Blair Miller, who wished to adopt her to bring the siblings back together.
The girl was given into Adam Montgomery’s custody, though, after her father was released from prison following a narcotics robbery and shooting. Harmony had never previously met her father. When she was born, he was serving time for shooting a guy in the face.
The child’s welfare payments were immediately collected by Montgomery, and his estranged wife was charged with keeping them coming even after Harmony was last seen alive. Currently, Kayla Montgomery is working with the police on the murder case against her husband.
“Harmony’s fate was sealed the minute she became a number and/or a caseload,” Bobbitt-Miller said. “She’s more than that to us, and we won’t stop fighting until change happens.”
A group of lawmakers is seeking to establish a new “Harmony commission” designed to “study and make recommendations related to the welfare and best interests of children in care and protection cases.”
An investigation conducted by a watchdog organisation last year revealed grave “miscalculations” in the family court system’s choice to give Harmony to her father prior to her abduction and suspected murder. Supporters of the Millers are urged to contact their state senators and representatives and persuade them to support H.4088 and S.118.
Blair Miller testified before the Massachusetts Senate’s Joint Committee on Children, Families, and Persons with Disabilities during an hour-long session on Tuesday. “We now live in Arlington, Virginia, and we came back to Massachusetts to officially adopt Jamison at National Adoption Day in November of 2019,” she said.
“We now know that just days later, while we were celebrating Jamison’s birthday back in Virginia, Harmony was being brutally beaten. She was being attacked and eventually killed. The same day.”
But it took years before anyone even realised there was a problem. Adam Montgomery is now being charged with killing her by beating her while consuming drugs and residing in a car, then concealing her body. He entered a not-guilty plea.
Unknowingly, the Miller family devoted years to locating him so they could reconnect her with her brother.
Harmony’s biological mother discovered that she had never been enrolled in school in 2021 after giving up custody years earlier due to her own difficulties with drug misuse.
The remains of Harmony have not been located. However, authorities claim they have discovered her DNA in multiple places where they think her father may have hidden it before renting a U-Haul van and dumping her bones in a marsh outside of Boston.
