When Blair Miller and his husband learned that their adopted son, 5-year-old Jamison Miller, had an older half-sister named Harmony, they knew they wanted to keep the siblings’ relationship intact.
“[Jamison] was in and out of a lot of different homes, and along the way, Harmony was there with him for some of those homes,” said Miller, a Washington news correspondent for Cox Media Group and a former Boston Channel 25 News anchor who now lives in northern Virginia. “They went through a lot together, and they had a very close relationship at that time. We hear stories of Harmony trying to help Jamison and just look out for Jamison along the way, so it was very important to us that that relationship continue.”
Miller and his husband inquired about adopting Harmony soon after they adopted Jamison in late 2019, but the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families told them that her biological father Adam Montgomery had been awarded custody of her in 2019.
Miller joined Boston Public Radio Wednesday to discuss Harmony’s disappearance. She has not been seen since fall of 2019.
“We kind of believed in the system at that point, and we were trusting of the system,” Miller said. “And obviously, we’re learning a lot more about what was going on during that time.”
Her father Adam is now being held without bail as authorities search for the seven-year-old girl. Kayla Montgomery, Adam’s estranged wife and Harmony’s stepmother, has been arrested and charged related to Harmony’s care and the financial support she and Adam she received from the state. Harmony’s biological mother Crystal Sorey, who lost custody of Harmony in 2018, first alerted authorities to her daughter’s disappearance in November 2021.
The case has attracted national attention in recent weeks as authorities search for Harmony, closely following updates as Adam was arrested, police searched his Manchester home and, most recently, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu lambasted Massachusetts’ highest court for its handling of the custody case.
Adam was previously convicted of threatening two women with a pellet gun in 2008 after breaking into their Malden apartment to rob them. After police arrived, Montgomery allegedly turned the gun towards an officer before he was wrestled to the ground. Montgomery later pleaded guilty to armed robbery and assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. In 2014, Montgomery pleaded guilty and served an 18-month sentence in Massachusetts after he shot a man in the head during a drug deal.
On Tuesday, Sununu attacked the Massachusetts courts in a letter to the chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, Kimberly S. Budd, calling Adam a “monster” and saying that the Massachusetts court failed to coordinate with the New Hampshire child welfare agency.
“Why would the Massachusetts court choose to place custody of Harmony with this horrible individual?” Sununu wrote. “No child should ever leave Massachusetts in the custody of a dangerous criminal.”
According to Sununu, the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families asked New Hampshire’s child welfare agency to conduct a home study of Adam and his wife, Kayla, in 2018. But before New Hampshire’s Division for Children, Youth and Families could gather information about the Montgomerys, a juvenile court judge in Lawrence, Mass., awarded custody to Adam.
But Elizabeth Bartholet, the Morris Wasserstein Professor of Law, Emeritus, at Harvard Law School, and faculty director of the Child Advocacy Program, told Boston Public Radio that Sununu’s statement is a “self-protective move on his part” and that both the Massachusetts and New Hampshire courts and child protective systems should be blamed.
“There’s absolutely no reason that Harmony would have been given to her biological father rather than adoption even being considered — except that biological parents rights [in the court system] reign supreme,” Bartholet said. “Why is the system paying attention to the biological father here, and not the biological sibling connection? Well, it’s because the sibling is a kid, and kids don't count. What counts are adults, and what counts are parents, not kids.”
“The court and the [child protective services] system in both states, all they had to do was scratch the surface to find out [that Adam] was an unfit father.”
Gov. Charlie Baker said Wednesday that he “felt his [Sununu’s] pain in that letter” and that the state is working to find out what happened in Harmony’s case. A spokesperson for the Massachusetts Court System also said Tuesday that “the Massachusetts Trial Court is cooperating fully with that investigation and will cooperate with other investigations as authorized by law.”
Over the past two years, Miller says that he and his family tried to make contact with Adam to bring Jamison and Harmony together.
“We reached out to [Adam] directly through social media, just saying, ‘hey, this is who we are, we would love this, Jamison is our son, and we would really like to have a relationship with Harmony. Can we FaceTime? Can we do this or that?” Miller said. “We never heard anything back.”
“[Jamison] has yearned for this relationship with [Harmony] — he talks about her. We can recall many stories where, like at a baseball game, we were leaving, and he thought he saw a girl that looked like his sister, and he said, ‘there’s Harmony,’” Miller said. “It breaks your heart to see. Just the other night, he drew a picture of Harmony. He'll tell his teachers, ‘I have a sister, her name is Harmony. She has blonde hair, glasses and blue eyes.’ He's very proud of Harmony, and he has been since day one of coming into our family.”
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly identified Jamison Miller as Jamison Montgomery. His name has been corrected. This story was also updated to correct details about Adam Montgomery's sentence: he served 18 months in prison for the 2014 shooting, and did not receive an 18-month suspended sentence.
