This past June, the bodies of Amy Steadman, her daughter, Sarah Myers, and Myers four children were found in Steadman's apartment. The story has rocked the city of Mechanicville, where the tragedy took place, and reverberated around the state. In the months since their deaths, police investigations revealed the mother and grandmother likely poisoned the children with over the counter medications and kratom. The children's father, Brady Harmon, has filed a notice of claim against the city and the county.
WAMC's Aaron Shellow-Lavine spoke with Brendan Lyons from the Times Union, shortly after new reporting from Brendan on the story:
Aaron Shellow-Lavine: Brendan, before we even get to what the actual meat of the report is: in the nature of this show, which is, sort of, lifting up a little bit of the curtain behind some of the work that gets into the reporting, walk me through a couple of the steps that you took to actually get this new information.
Brendan Lyons: Well, the attorney for Mr. Harmon had filed a petition late Friday in State Supreme Court in Saratoga County. That petition seeks to compel the county to preserve evidence involving the children's deaths, and also to turn over its CPS records, among other things. These Child Protective Services records are statutorily exempt from freedom-of-information requests and similar. They are lawfully private records. But Mr. Harmon is the surviving parent of those children, so he has a right of access to those records, which his attorney had requested them from the state office of Children and Family Services, which apparently keeps copies or summaries of the CPS reports prepared by the local county agencies. They had gotten those records; I was not aware of that. My colleague Wendy [Liberatore] has been covering this story, but she did not have time to get into looking into that case. And when I opened it up Saturday morning, I was astonished to see that there had been all of these child protective services records attached as an exhibit in that petition, and I just recognized right away that these were the details that I really thought we may never see, or that it might take years for them to come out through some sort of, you know, pretrial discovery and in the litigation. So the narratives of those CPS reports recounted the concerns that would be raised by the school district, the concerns from medical practices about the mother's treatment of the children and falsifying their records to make it look like they were sick when they were not at school. It also went deeper into the symptoms that the notice of claim had talked about that the mother suffered from what was known as Munchausen syndrome by proxy, which is that mental health condition that's considered a form of abuse and causes, in this case, the mother to fabricate or exaggerate illnesses in in her children.
Aaron Shellow-Lavine: Some of those details in your most recent report that stuck out to me, you know, these kids starting as early as in 2021 were missing upwards of 50 days out of the school year. Those concerns got raised. We know an incident in 2024 where the kids showed up to school overdosed on Benadryl to a point where naloxone was administered to one of them. One of the children was essentially, I don't know the right phrasing for this, but kicked out of her pediatric practice, the doctor that she was going to see because her mother was forging these signatures on doctor's notes for the school. I mean, this is a case where we are seeing so many instances where folks could have stepped in, much to what Brady Harmon's notice of claim is saying. That's a $400 million lawsuit, but at the same time, something that his attorneys were telling me was that this is an effort to preserve a lot of the documentation of this. A phrase that is repeated multiple times in your most recent piece, is that it is unclear why nothing came of these various reports. As a reporter, when you're seeing that, and that's something that you have to write, walk me through the just having to say that this is what we know, and yet nothing was done about it.
Brendan Lyons: You know, our job is just to report the facts, what we know. But you could see from these reports that the allegations of her, troubling, inadequate guardianship and educational neglect were in the backdrop of this form of abuse that may not be as common as physical abuse, but certainly appears to you know to inflict psychological, developmental damage on these children that their mom would deliberately keep them out of school for long stretches, or allow them to not go to school as well. If this was physical abuse, for instance, would those children have been taken out quicker than if it was a form of mental health abuse that they were suffering from? But the May 2024 incident when they overdosed, I think everyone you know on the family side of this, the father side of this, agrees that that should have been the red flag, that was the turning point.
Aaron Shellow-Lavine: So, obviously it's one thing for a reporter to find these dead ends and not be able to answer those questions, but it's got to just be an entirely different situation for a father to be running into these things and to feel compelled to, you know, file this notice of claim to try and preserve some of what this physical evidence and stored evidence is. And so, what kind of response are you or Wendy getting from the local entities that were actually named in Harmon's notice of claim here? Are they having any sort of reaction? Are you hearing from state officials? What are we hearing, and who are we hearing it from?
Brendan Lyons: Yeah, my colleague Wendy is following up as we speak to try to find out what they knew, what did supervisors know, for instance, in the CPS unit. I don't think we're going to have a news conference where Saratoga County Child Protective Services is going to explain its side of things. But there are lawmakers at the county level who are elected officials who are concerned about this and asking for some explanation from their CPS and county probation department. Like the public, and other people concerned by this, we are trying to get answers into whether or not policies were violated. Was there a, you know, staff shortages or anything that may have contributed to these children not being taken out of an unsafe environment sooner before they were killed.
Aaron Shellow-Lavine: Brendan, thanks so much. I really appreciate you taking a couple minutes and walking through your latest reporting here. We appreciate it.
Brendan Lyons: You bet.
