Posts by Pat Grossmith
Three people face the prospect of life in prison after being indicted on charges connected to the overdose deaths of two people, one in 2022 and the other in 2023.
“I’m finally feeling relieved that there’s some justice being served,” said Crystal Sorey, the mother of 5-year-old Harmony Montgomery, outside the courthouse. She doesn’t use the Montgomery surname for her daughter anymore, she said, but refers to her as Harmony Renee, using her middle name.
A jury is deliberating the guilt or innocence of Adam Montgomery, accused of beating his 5-year-old daughter to death, hiding her body for months, and then disposing of it, after hearing testimony over 10 days in Hillsborough County Superior Court North.
The state on Tuesday rested its case against Adam Montgomery, after playing a recording of a call he made from the Valley Street jail saying investigators wasted taxpayers’ dollars in conducting searches and following up on tips from “nut jobs.”
A reluctant witness, a possible new mystery witness, and Adam Montgomery making an appearance in the courtroom on video, not in person, was only a portion of what happened Friday in Hillsborough County Superior Court North.
Testimony on the seventh day of Adam Montgomery’s murder trial followed the movements of the CMC bag prosecutors say contained his slain daughter’s remains as it moved from a family shelter to a walk-in cooler at now defunct downtown restaurant, to a Union Street apartment and then to the EconoLodge.
A retired Manchester police detective testified Wednesday that he “knew it was a dead body” when he removed the ceiling vent from a room where the Montgomery family had stayed in the winter of 2020 at Families in Transition shelter.
Kayla Montgomery’s mother testified Tuesday to meeting Harmony Montgomery only once, after Thanksgiving 2019, when the family of five were evicted from their home at 55 Gilford St.
Kayla Montgomery broke down on the stand Monday after a prosecutor held up a poster-size photo of her murdered stepdaughter and telling the jurors her home was in prison, she was not allowed to keep her children, does not have any right to them and cannot speak to them.
Kayla Montgomery, the estranged wife of Adam Montgomery, who is accused of murdering his 5-year-old daughter, told jurors Friday how Adam in December 2019 repeatedly punched Harmony in the head, killing her, and that for months after, how he schemed to hide her body until he finally got rid of it in a March 2020 trip into Massachusetts.