Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

Four Laws Wall Off DCYF From Accountability. On Friday, the Last Watchdog Goes Dark.

A hospitalized 13-year-old, 1,700 abuse claims in limbo, a $38 million verdict the state wants cut to $475,000, and a child advocate cleaning out her desk. All of it is written in statute.

On Friday, New Hampshire’s Office of the Child Advocate loses its only leader, with no replacement named and no deputy allowed to step up. That same office spent the week describing an assault at the state-run Sununu Youth Services Center that left a 13-year-old with a broken femur. The office that watches the watchers of children goes dark at the moment the Division for Children, Youth and Families needs watching most.

My argument, up front: the crisis around DCYF is the predictable output of four laws working exactly as written. A confidentiality statute seals the agency’s files. A damages cap shrinks what the state owes when juries find it liable. A watchdog statute is being read out of existence by the office that defends the state in court. And a settlement-fund law was rewritten last year to hand that same office a veto over what abuse survivors get paid. Each provision had a defensible purpose on paper. Stacked together, they form a wall, and children are on the wrong side of it.

The four walls, mapped. (Graphic: GSR)

The week the watchdog goes dark

On July 17, an older resident at the Sununu Center attacked a younger one, according to reporting by NHPR. A witness who viewed the video told the station the boy was choked in a headlock; the child advocate’s office said an incident report described him turning purple. He was hospitalized with a broken femur. State law, NHPR notes, requires immediate notice to the child advocate of any serious injury to a child in state care. Child Advocate Cassandra Sanchez said she was notified two days later.

Days later, clinical director Dr. Samantha Morin tendered her resignation. Sanchez and Sen. Victoria Sullivan said she resigned over ethical concerns; Morin could not be reached, and employer Dartmouth Health did not respond to NHPR. Sullivan, who led a legislative investigation of restraints at the facility, went further Tuesday, saying she will ask the Executive Council to remove Health and Human Services Commissioner Lori Weaver and DCYF Director Marie Noonan. “They cannot be trusted and failed as leaders,” Sullivan said.

This is the same facility where the child advocate’s office reported in late March that staff held children under an excessively restrictive lockdown, and where, per Bulletin and Valley News reporting, investigators found security footage of an employee breaking a child’s bone through an illegal restraint. The center’s director, Joshua Nye, resigned in May after under six months on the job. More than half its youth counselor positions sit vacant, NHPR reports, largely from staff injuries. The department says it has mandated overtime, stepped up recruiting, ordered refresher restraint and de-escalation training, and is pursuing body cameras and an outside consultant.

And the office that surfaced all of this is about to lose its head. Gov. Kelly Ayotte declined to reappoint Sanchez, who has held the job since 2022. Ayotte’s replacement pick, Diana Fenton, withdrew in March after questions about her impartiality. No new nominee has been announced, and Sanchez, serving on holdover status, must leave this week.

That clause reads like a fail-safe. Watch it bend. Sanchez told lawmakers Tuesday the Attorney General’s office will not seat an associate child advocate and told her staff to bring issues to the Attorney General instead. She has advised her team to publish its Sununu Center investigation before handing anything over, and she asked aloud whether the maneuvering is meant to stall that report. The Attorney General defends the state against every abuse lawsuit described below. This month it issued its own report finding what NHPR summarized as chronic dysfunction and dangerously low staffing at the Sununu Center, while disputing the watchdog’s account of systemic abuse. The office positioning itself as the inbox for child-welfare oversight is the state’s own defense counsel. That is a conflict you can see from Mount Washington. That judgment is mine; I stand on it.

The wall of confidentiality

Why does so much of what DCYF does stay invisible until a child is hospitalized or dead? The Legislature built it that way. The agency’s case files sit behind one of the tightest secrecy statutes in New Hampshire law.

There is a real child-protection rationale here. Case files name victims, reporters of abuse, and family members who deserve privacy. Notice what the statute also accomplishes. A caseworker’s errors, a supervisor’s sign-offs, a pattern of missed warnings: all of it lives inside records that are a crime to share. Asked about the July 17 assault, a department spokesperson pointed NHPR to state law strictly limiting juvenile-justice disclosures. The confidentiality that protects a child in the file also protects every adult whose name appears above the signature line.

The wall holds in court, too. In the Saddleback Mountain Retreat case, state agencies said for years that the plaintiff’s records no longer existed, until her lawyers found documents this February they had been told were gone, InDepthNH reported. Secrecy plus custody of the files is a powerful combination for a defendant.

What “one incident” costs

Now to the courtroom and the second wall: the state’s damages cap. Under RSA 541-B:14, I, the state’s civil liability is capped at $475,000 per claimant for any single incident. The statute dates to the 1980s; nobody who wrote it imagined the YDC litigation.

In May 2024, a jury awarded David Meehan $38 million after finding the state fully liable for abuse he suffered as a teenager at the Manchester Youth Development Center, where his lawyers said he was raped and beaten hundreds of times in the 1990s. The verdict form asked how many incidents. The jury wrote one. The trial judge, at the state’s request, cut the award to $475,000, and the fight over that number reached the New Hampshire Supreme Court last November. The state’s theory is that its failure to run the facility safely was a single incident, no matter how many rapes followed. “Two hundred rapes equals one incident is not a fair balance,” Meehan’s lawyer Daniel Deane told the justices, as reported by the Union Leader. A ruling was still pending as the fund debate ran through the Legislature in June; hundreds of similar cases wait on the answer.

A second jury just showed what happens when the question is asked properly. On June 30, jurors awarded Kristy Gesse $16 million after finding she suffered 106 incidents of sexual assault by Peter Tsetsilas, operator of a Deerfield group home where the state placed her at 16 in the early 1990s. Judge John Kissinger defined an incident as each “separate unit of experience,” the Concord Monitor reported, sidestepping the confusion that swallowed the Meehan verdict. Evidence showed another girl had reported Tsetsilas to State Police and a child welfare worker in the mid-1980s, and the state licensed him anyway. The catch: jurors apportioned only 25 percent of fault to the state, so New Hampshire owes $4 million while $12 million lands on a dead abuser, his dead wife, and a defunct business. Gesse’s lawyers plan to appeal the apportionment. InDepthNH reports she is the first of roughly 300 claimants alleging abuse in group homes the state contracted with. The state settled a separate case, Michael Gilpatrick’s, for $10 million rather than face a second YDC trial, per Associated Press reporting; former staffer Bradley Asbury was convicted as an accomplice to Gilpatrick’s 1998 rape and sentenced to 20 to 40 years, while another, Stephen Murphy, was acquitted on three charges last fall as a jury hung on five more.

Drawn to scale. (Graphic: GSR)

The fund, the veto, and the empty checkbook

The third wall is newer. In 2022 the Legislature created the YDC Claims Administration and Settlement Fund so survivors could resolve claims without trial. It worked, to a point: 2,175 claims filed, 425 settled, committed payouts topping $250 million, per the Concord Monitor and NHPR. Awards cap at $2.5 million and average between $500,000 and $600,000. Nearly 1,700 claims remain; survivors seek $1.8 billion.

Then came 2025. Ayotte and the Legislature restructured the fund: the governor and Executive Council now choose the administrator, replacing the independent role held by former Chief Justice John Broderick, and the Attorney General’s office gained the power to reject any proposed payment, per NHPR and Monitor reporting. Survivors’ lawyers called the veto a betrayal. The budget also shorted the fund’s promised money, and hearings paused for roughly a year. Administrator Gerard Boyle, a retired judge, asked for $55 million in June and got $20 million, enough, he says, for hearings from August to early November. His estimate for resolving everything approaches $1 billion. The state has appropriated $185 million since 2022, plus the new $20 million. Do that arithmetic and sit with it.

The fund’s arithmetic. (Graphic: GSR)

So the office defending the state in the Meehan and Gesse courtrooms also holds a veto over what the fund pays, and now wants oversight complaints routed to its desk while the watchdog seat sits empty. Every one of those facts is lawful. That is my point.

The children outside the headlines

The YDC scandal is the loudest DCYF story, but the pattern runs wider. Since mid-2024 the Attorney General’s office has paid more than $10 million to settle three lawsuits over children who died after the system was warned: $5.75 million to the mother of Dennis Vaughan, killed in Laconia in 2019; $2.25 million to Crystal Sorey, whose daughter Harmony Montgomery was murdered by her father after repeated warnings to DCYF and Massachusetts authorities; and $2.25 million in the death of Elijah Lewis, NHPR reported. Settlements close cases with no court finding of fault. The checks clear; the system stays sealed.

A federal class action, B.D. v. Governor, certified in 2024, alleges DCYF unnecessarily warehouses teens with mental health disabilities in institutions instead of community placements, violating the Americans with Disabilities Act. The state has litigated it for years. And the 2025 budget cut four of the child advocate’s nine positions and barred the office from partisan advocacy, New Hampshire Bulletin reporting shows, after the House voted to eliminate the office outright.

What accountability would look like

None of this takes imagination. Follow the law already on the books: if Sanchez leaves Friday without a confirmed successor, RSA 21-V:3 says the associate child advocate serves as acting child advocate. The Attorney General’s office does not get to read that sentence out of the statute. Restore the watchdog’s staff; the Legislature’s own Sununu Center investigators recommended reversing the cuts and strengthening the office, per the Bulletin. Name a nominee. And separate the referee from the defense table: as long as the Attorney General defends the state in these cases, it should hold neither the settlement veto nor the oversight inbox.

Transparency has room to move even inside RSA 170-G:8-a. The statute seals case records. It does not seal counts. DCYF can lawfully publish how many assessments run overdue, how many caseworker jobs sit vacant, how many children sleep in institutions or out of state, and how fast serious injuries reach the advocate. The department could publish every one of those numbers tomorrow without breaking the seal. It chooses not to.

A 13-year-old with a broken femur is in a hospital because the adults running this system could not keep him safe inside a locked state facility. On Friday, the one office built to say so out loud loses its voice. The wall around DCYF was written one statute at a time. It can be unwritten the same way.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note: Every hyperlink above was opened and confirmed live on July 23, 2026. Two government pages that block automated retrieval (the DHHS Right-to-Know guidance page and the state courts’ Meehan briefing PDF) are cited in plain text with their contents confirmed through search indexing; the RSA 541-B:14, I cap language is quoted from the state’s own filed brief. The Supreme Court had not announced a Meehan ruling as of press time; if one lands, this piece will be updated. For the state’s side, this analysis relies on the department’s public statements to NHPR and to lawmakers and on the Attorney General’s July report; a direct response from DHHS or the Governor’s office is welcome at granitestatereport@gmail.com and will be added in full. Videos are embedded from WMUR-TV’s official YouTube channel and were confirmed live and playable at publication; all graphics are original to Granite State Report. One spelling note: most outlets covering the June 30 verdict, including the Concord Monitor, Union Leader, and InDepthNH, render the plaintiff’s name Gesse; NHPR renders it Geese. This article follows the majority usage. Corrections: granitestatereport@gmail.com.