Diamond Cannady, cousin and caretaker of Monica Cannady’s only surviving child, wipes away tears as she speaks during a virtual news conference Monday announcing a lawsuit against the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office. March 10, 2025. Screenshot.
On the night of January 14, 2023 a Pontiac woman amid a mental health crisis, and her three children ages 10, 9 and 3, went to sleep in a field. The next morning only one person, the 10-year-old daughter, woke up.
A lawsuit filed by the family on Friday alleges the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office was aware the mother, Monica Cannady, 35, was experiencing mental distress and had been trying to break into houses while pleading for help with her children, dressed in bedsheets in tow, but chose to act with “rock-hard indifference.”
Monica was a kind person, who would donate hand-me-down clothes and make meals for anyone in need, Diamond Cannady, cousin and caretaker of Monica’s only surviving child said during a virtual news conference Monday. Monica loved her children, Diamond added, but during a mental health crisis, officers from Oakland County responded with racism and disgust throughout the day prior to her and her children’s deaths.
“No one with this kind of disregard for human life should be trusted to protect any community, let alone the community of Pontiac,” Diamond said. “That kind of bias and that kind of willingness to just write someone off because of where they live or because of the color of their skin cost Monica and her kids their lives. No family should ever have to wonder if their lives would have mattered more if they looked differently or lived differently or lived in a different or wealthier community.”
The loss of Monica and her sons Kyle Milton, 9, and Malik Milton, 3, have devastated their tight knit family, Diamond said and now the focus is on ensuring Monica’s daughter can have access to the resources she will need to heal and navigate life after this trauma.
The girl is not the same child she was before, Diamond said, as she has been deprived of the peace and happiness any child should enjoy.
“Those of us who stepped up to raise Monica’s surviving child, including myself, had to become parents to a grieving child overnight,” Diamond said. “For a very long time she could not sleep alone and she needed to see us breathing just to know that we were still there.”
The family’s lawsuit names the officers who interacted with Monica, her family and concerned residents in the days leading up to the deaths and outlines actions and inactions taken by the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office, or OCSO.
A request by Michigan Advance was made to OCSO for comment about the lawsuit, but has yet to be returned.
The lawsuit alleges that the OCSO had ample opportunities with multiple points of contact to identify that the family was in grave danger but instead officers became annoyed, voiced their indifference and disgust of the family and exasperated Monica to further believe the police were going to kill her children, which was why she led them to the field to sleep, the lawsuit reads.
The day before the family went to the field, OCSO responded for a wellness check on Monica at McLaren Hospital in Pontiac in the early afternoon, the lawsuit states. Though she exhibited signs of distress and impairment, Sheriff’s Deputy Devon Bernritter did not contact Child Protective Services or other intervention services, the lawsuit says, instead electing to follow the family in his patrol car, “cementing her paranoid delusion and fear that the police were trying to kill her and the children”.
At around 5 p.m. a person called 911 to report Monica was walking around with her crying children, “clearly in imminent danger”, the lawsuit says. Sheriff’s Deputy Alex Kazal was dispatched to the scene, but didn’t get out of his patrol car, telling the caller that it was “not a police matter” saying he had been ordered to assist on a traffic stop elsewhere. The lawsuit alleges that that was not true and Kazul had been sent to search for the family, but refused.
In footage published by several media outlets, Kazul is heard angrily reacting on a phone call to being called to check on the family, saying he doesn’t want to come to work anymore, and it’s just “homeless people being homeless”. Kazul has since resigned from the office.
“What am I gonna do? The kids will still be there in a f-ing hour when we get another welfare check for it and they’ll probably be just fine because people in Pontiac just don’t die,” Kazul said in footage published by the Detroit Free Press. “I’ll rip the f-ing family apart and put them in f-ing bullshit foster care where they can get raped, are you f-ing insane?”
Over the next few hours, the 911 caller continued to call for help for the family, the lawsuit says and when deputies responded again, they didn’t perform a search and left the area.
The Oakland County Sheriff’s office and its deputies violated their duty to promote public safety, instead making conscious decisions to ignore reports and signs of danger for the family, the lawsuit reads.
“These decisions were based on the disparate treatment of Black residents in Pontiac, a predominantly Black community, in comparison with the more favorable treatment of residents in the predominantly Caucasian communities of Oakland County surrounding Pontiac,” the lawsuit states.
This didn’t have to happen, Diamond said Monday. Something has to change at the Sheriff’s Office and the family’s hope is that the lawsuit will work to prevent another family that looks like theirs from experiencing the same callousness and neglect from law enforcement in Pontiac.
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