Four children found dead alongside their mother and grandmother in a Mechanicville, New York, apartment were murdered, authorities now say, while both adults took their own lives, a determination that points to a family annihilation carried out behind closed doors.
Police Chief William Rabbitt told the Times-Union this week that the deaths of Harper Harmon, 13; Hudson Harmon, 11; and 10-year-old twins Gavin and Gracelynn Harmon have all been officially ruled homicides. Their mother, Sarah Myers, 44, and their grandmother, Amy Steadman, 64, were found dead in the same apartment on June 23. Both adults' deaths have been ruled suicides.
One of the children was fatally stabbed. The remaining three appear to have been poisoned. At a press conference last month, Rabbitt said investigators recovered prescription and over-the-counter medications inside the apartment "indicating intentional poisoning." He also disclosed that a handwritten note found at the scene "strongly suggested" Steadman was "involved" in the children's deaths.
Rabbitt went further in a statement to NBC5 last week. He said authorities had "not ruled out that Sarah Myers was also complicit in the deaths of her children." Toxicology results were still pending at that time, leaving open questions about exactly what substances were used and in what sequence the deaths occurred.
The bodies were discovered after a neighbor requested a welfare check. Responding officers found all six family members dead inside the apartment. Rabbitt said at the time that the remains were too badly decomposed for officers to immediately identify them.
Neither Rabbitt nor the Mechanicville Police Department responded to messages from the New York Post on Friday. No arrests have been reported, and no charges have been disclosed.
The children's father, Brady Harmon, lives in Utah. He told the Times-Union that the four kids were supposed to spend July through September with him. Instead, he held a funeral.
Harmon last saw his children in person in November 2019. His final phone call with them lasted 15 minutes on June 7, just over two weeks before their bodies were found. He and Myers had been locked in what has been described as a bitter custody battle, though the details of the dispute and the court handling it have not been made public.
Harmon told the Times-Union that the condition of the children's remains made it impossible to bring them home for burial. Cases involving deaths initially difficult to classify often leave families waiting weeks or months for answers, and this case has followed that pattern.
"We could not bring their bodies home due to the horrific state they were in. Their ashes were spread where my father's ashes were laid to rest, on top of a mountain here in Utah."
He had previously told the Post that his children "seemed like happy little kids."
Authorities have not released the contents of the handwritten note found at the scene. Rabbitt characterized it only as "strongly suggesting" Steadman's involvement. Police have not disclosed the manner of suicide for either adult, nor have they identified which child was stabbed.
The gap between what investigators have said publicly and what remains unknown is wide. No official has described a definitive sequence of events. No one has explained how two adults and four children ended up dead in the same apartment without anyone outside noticing until decomposition had set in. Situations where multiple family members are found dead inside a home often reveal failures that extend well beyond the immediate perpetrators.
The pending toxicology results may eventually clarify the poisoning method and timeline. But the central facts are already established: four children, the oldest just thirteen, the youngest a pair of ten-year-old twins, were killed inside a home where the only other occupants were the two people responsible for keeping them safe.
Mechanicville is a small city north of Albany with a population of roughly 5,000. A case of this scale in a community that size draws attention to every system that touched the family, courts, child services, neighbors, and whether any of them saw warning signs that went unheeded. Those questions, for now, remain open.
Investigations that begin with disturbing circumstances surrounding a death sometimes produce answers that arrive too late to matter for the victims. The toxicology report, whenever it comes, will fill in details. It will not change the outcome for Harper, Hudson, Gavin, and Gracelynn.
Brady Harmon spent years fighting for time with his children through the courts. He last held them more than six years ago. The system that was supposed to sort out their custody could not keep them alive long enough to see their father again.
Cases involving unexpected findings from medical examiners often reshape public understanding of what happened behind closed doors. In Mechanicville, the official rulings have now confirmed what the evidence suggested from the start: these children did not die of natural causes. Someone in that apartment killed them.
The investigation continues. But the children are buried, the suspects are dead, and the father who wanted them for the summer is left to scatter their ashes on a mountain in Utah, the closest he could get to bringing them home.
When the people entrusted with protecting children are the ones who take their lives, no toxicology report and no court filing will ever make it right. The system owed those four kids more than it delivered.