'Victim of child torture': New details emerge in murder of Emma Cole, girl found in Smyrna

The mother and stepfather of Emma Grace Cole, the toddler whose charred remains were found in a Smyrna softball field nearly three years ago, “particularly targeted” the girl “for torture,” according to recently filed court documents ahead of the pair's sentencing.

The documents shed light on the child’s agonizing final year of life and detail how Emma Grace’s three living siblings were also “victims of child abuse and neglect” in ways not previously made public.

In addition to being subjected to physical punishment, including forced exercise and severe spankings, the children repeatedly watched as their sister was “singled out” by Kristie Cole Haas and Brandon Haas.

As a result, they continue to suffer from “deep psychological trauma” that may have long-term effects on their mental and behavioral health, a child abuse expert and Nemours Children’s Hospital doctor wrote in her assessment of the case.

This, the doctor said, will require “aggressive and ongoing mental health intervention to support their emotional recoveries.”

Delaware Online/The News Journal has reviewed the documents in their entirety. Due to the nature of the abuse and that three children are still living, this news organization has left out certain details and has chosen not to publish the court filing as a whole.

‘Didn’t say anything’

The documents − a 22-page sentencing memorandum accompanied by 122 pages of exhibits − were filed Friday, about a month before Kristie and Brandon Haas are slated to be sentenced for the death of Emma Grace and the abuse of the other three children.

Brandon Haas pleaded guilty in early March to four counts of endangering the welfare of a child: one, a class F felony, and the other three misdemeanors. At the time, the hearing was closed to the public and all details about the plea were sealed.

Following last-minute negotiations in late May after learning that her husband was cooperating with prosecutors, Kristie Haas pleaded guilty to murder by abuse or neglect. She also pleaded guilty to abuse of a corpse and endangering the welfare of a child.

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Prosecutors and Kristie Haas’ defense team are jointly recommending a sentence of 30 years behind bars. For Brandon Haas, attorneys have asked for open sentencing, meaning prosecutors will not offer a recommendation and instead leave the decision in the hands of Kent County Superior Court Judge Noel Primos.

“I think it’s atrocious,” Kelsey Cole Navarro, Kristie Haas’ sister, previously said of Brandon Haas’ deal. “Maybe he didn’t kill her, but he was with Kristie for a whole year after and didn’t say anything.”

Hockey pucks, spatulas and belts

The sentencing memorandum and accompanying exhibits provide new insight into the abuse Emma Grace and her siblings suffered beginning as early as the summer of 2018, while also detailing Brandon Haas’ role in the torture.

Prior to the filing of the document, the toddler’s family was largely unaware of what the children went through and who was responsible for the majority of the abuse.

They had told Delaware Online/The News Journal they believed Kristie Haas was to blame for much of it, given that only she was charged with murder. But they also believed Brandon Haas had abused the children and then helped cover up Emma Grace’s death.

Interviews that investigators conducted with Emma Grace’s siblings, Brandon and Kristie Haas and other family members – including Brandon Haas’ mother – confirm the family’s suspicions.

According to the documents, all four children were subjected to chores inappropriate for their ages, including the second-youngest, who was not even 5 years old at the time, being told to clean toilets, sweep the bathroom floor and vacuum the house.

If the chores were not done to Kristie or Brandon Haas’ satisfaction, or if the children misbehaved, Kristie Haas would “whoop all their asses," Brandon Haas told investigators. Kristie admitted that she would slap the children with a hockey puck or hit them with a spatula, but claimed that after being discharged from a drug rehabilitation program in early 2017, she “no longer hit her children with a belt.”

One of the children, however, told doctors that “before Emma went to the special place,” if the toddler was “being bad” – including crying or screaming, soiling herself or stealing food – Kristie Haas “would punish Emma, including spanking Emma with a belt.”

Emma Grace’s siblings, too, were spanked with a belt that sometimes “(left) a mark,” one child said, naming both Brandon and Kristie Haas as perpetrators.

They were also forced to do extra chores and “wall sits” – a leg exercise in which a person sits against the wall like they are in a chair but without support – and even had hot sauce or pepper, “or something else spicy,” put under their tongue by Brandon Haas if they misbehaved.

One of the children went into even further detail, "stating that once when she was crying after receiving vaccinations at the doctor's office, she got whooped and that (Brandon Haas) whooped all of her siblings,” wrote Dr. Stephanie Deutsch, medical director for Nemours Children's Hospital's Children at Risk Evaluation Program, in a letter to prosecutors.

“She described that (Brandon Haas) whooped her with wood, described as thick pieces of scrap wood that he had for his projects and made into paddles so he could hit her on the back,” the letter added.

‘Singled out for torture and abuse’

Despite all four children being subjected to Kristie and Brandon’s abuse, prosecutors wrote in the sentencing memorandum that Emma Grace was “singled out for torture and abuse.”

Her siblings noted this too, with one telling doctors that she “was confused as to why KH would do this to Emma and not the rest of the siblings.”

She also said she “didn’t ever remember Emma being called to dinner and that KH would starve Emma.”

Through police interviews, prosecutors learned that “at various times,” Kristie Haas would give her youngest daughter only rice and oatmeal for meals.

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The toddler’s sister said she would try to help Emma Grace by hiding food and taking it to the girl, as well as care for the girl at night “because sometimes Emma was not breathing” and she’d “need to keep Emma by her side to keep her warm.”

Yet she also detailed that some of Emma Grace’s worst torture came nightly when the then-3-year-old was forced to run while holding weights or pull a weighted sled down the basement staircase.

“She would be smacked, but was too young to run and couldn’t really do it,” one of Emma Grace’s siblings told a forensic interviewer. “If she stopped running, she would be hit with something … (including) a spatula, change purse, belt buckle and flip flops.”

The child also told the interviewer Emma had bruises on her face, stomach, and legs, stating "bruises were everywhere and provided an illustration.”

“Emma Cole was a victim of child torture,” Deutsch, the Nemours doctor, wrote.

She later added that the girl “was a targeted child compared to her siblings.”

'Mommy is the one who did it'

Though investigators were able to carefully document Emma Grace’s physical and emotional torture, her cause of death – and when exactly she died – remains unknown.

Because Kristie Haas set the girl’s body ablaze after dumping it in Smyrna’s Little Lass fields, Delaware’s Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Gary Collins couldn’t determine what killed her. He did, however, rule the death a homicide.

Brandon Haas told his brother in a phone call that he should “attribute Emma's death to ‘getting her ass beat,’” while one of Emma Grace's siblings told investigators that the day before the toddler disappeared, she heard Kristie Haas say: “That's it for Emma, Emma's not coming back.”

But absent a single act causing the toddler's death, Deutsch opined that given the description of the torture and starvation Emma Grace underwent – which was apparent in photos taken by Kristie Haas and others in late 2018 and early 2019 – malnourishment is “highly likely” to have been a contributing factor.

The Nemours doctor suggested in her letter to prosecutors that the drawn-out starvation may have led her organs to slowly fail. However, she also said the girl could have died after going into cardiac arrest, which is when a person’s heart suddenly stops beating.

Deutsch said this also likely would have been caused by starvation-related malnutrition.

No matter the cause, forensic interviewers and doctors who spoke with the children said that after the three were notified in January 2021 that Emma Grace was dead, they “nearly immediately concluded” their mother was responsible.

“Mommy is the one who did it,” one of the children said as the others explained that after Emma Grace “disappeared,” Kristie Haas had spun a tale that Emma Grace had gone to a facility to help with behavioral issues.

‘Emma’s not coming back’

Though at least one of Emma Grace’s siblings remembers Kristie Haas taking Emma Grace to the softball field the night before she disappeared, it’s not clear exactly when the toddler died.

In a post-arrest interview with FBI agents, which prosecutors called “self-serving,” Kristie Haas first claimed that Emma Grace was in a facility in Virginia receiving care for mental problems.

For four hours, she “invented a complex fiction” about the toddler’s progress at the facility and about having visited her there. Finally, after agents confronted her about her lies, she told them that on a Saturday or Sunday morning before July 4, 2019, she woke up and found Emma Grace dead in the bedroom the toddler shared with her brother.

Kristie Haas said she ran into the bathroom with the toddler, turned on the shower and held her there.

“Defendant claimed she ‘was so beautiful’ and ‘the happiest I’ve ever seen her,’” prosecutors wrote in the sentencing memorandum. “She claimed she ‘looked like she was just out of her misery.’”

When interviewed separately, Brandon Haas told a slightly different story.

He told investigators that around 5:30 or 6 a.m. on a Saturday or Sunday in July, Kristie Haas told him that “something bad happened” to Emma Grace. She said she had “been thinking about how to tell (him) this.”

“That’s when she said Emma’s not breathing, and I (expletive) lost it,” Brandon Haas told investigators. “I was, like, ‘we have to call – call 911. Call somebody.’”

He added that he “started (expletive) screaming” and went running into the house, where he found Emma Grace on the bed. When he leaned in toward her nose and mouth, he felt “that she was cold.”

Brandon Haas said though he kept screaming to call 911, his wife told him “it’s too late” and “insisted there was nothing that first responders would be able to do.”

He added that he went looking for his phone, but he ultimately “decided to gather up the other kids and bring them to his mom’s house and on a drive around State Route 9.”

Kristie Haas later corroborated some of this story, telling detectives that her husband “was freaking out” when she told him about Emma Grace’s death.

“He said, ‘Let’s call the police,’” Kristie Haas said. “And I told him to chill the (expletive) out. And then he was like, ‘Oh my God.’ And he sat on the couch and he had his hands over his head.”

She also acknowledged that after dissuading Brandon Haas from calling police, she took Emma Grace to the van, put her in her car seat and “vainly hoped she would wake up during a drive.”

Kristie Haas then said she took the toddler “somewhere beautiful. Somewhere where she could be – free.”

Brandon Haas told investigators that his wife never told him where she took Emma Grace and that after returning later that day, she would only say that the girl was “at peace” and “in heaven.”

Meanwhile, Kristie Haas told detectives that she visited Emma Grace’s body at the Smyrna softball field daily for about a week. Though she was “vague” about burning the girl’s body, prosecutors wrote in the sentencing memorandum, she “also claimed she set Emma’s body on fire one day as a symbolic measure to ‘set her free.’”

While Kristie Haas admitted something similar to her father, whom she called after her arrest, prosecutors said she never told Brandon Haas about the fire.

“When Brandon heard during his interview, apparently for the first time, that Defendant had burnt Emma’s body – ‘she was burning?’ – he began screaming and crying," prosecutors wrote. "'The (expletive) for? What’s the reasoning for that? ... What’s the reason for doing that?’”

A series of mistaken choices?

For the last three years – and even longer for Emma Grace’s former guardian, Tanya Axsom Conley – the toddler’s extended family has questioned whether the girl’s death could have been prevented.

Most agree that the system designed to keep children safe failed, at least while Emma Grace lived in Indiana. That’s where Kristie Haas is originally from and where the toddler lived for the first 20 months of her life.

As reported several years ago by Delaware Online/The News Journal and referenced in the sentencing memorandum, for most of her first year of life, Emma Grace was cared for by Conley, a great-aunt on her father’s side. (Emma Grace’s father was not involved in much of her short life.)

Kristie Haas, who was in the throes of addiction and struggling to care for her other three children when Emma Grace was born, had given the baby to Conley to care for shortly after her birth in January 2016.

An Indiana judge formally appointed Conley as Emma Grace’s guardian later that year, while Kristie Haas’ other three children went to live with their father. (Emma Grace does not share the same father as her siblings.)

Yet about a year after Conley officially assumed guardianship over Emma Grace, in the spring of 2017, Kristie Haas texted her saying she wanted the toddler back. In June 2017, she filed a petition with the courts to terminate the guardianship.

At the time, Kristie Haas was living in Delaware, where she’d moved after meeting Brandon Haas in a Florida drug treatment program. Brandon Haas, who is originally from New Castle County, and Kristie Haas had married by then. The woman’s ex still had custody of the three other children.

In a “hastily” convened hearing in Indiana in early August 2017, Kristie Haas made her case for reunification with Emma Grace. Conley was angry at the time – Kristie had been back in Indiana three to five times between February 2017, when she moved to Delaware, and the hearing, but didn’t once try to see Emma Grace.

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Even when she arrived in Bloomington, Indiana, for the court date, she didn’t ask Conley if she could see the girl.

At the hearing, Conley and her attorney argued that these weren’t Kristie Haas’ only opportunities to see Emma Grace though.

In July, Kristie’s mother, Belinda Johnson-Hurtado – a well-known attorney in Bloomington – took the other three children to Delaware for a nearly two-week visit. At the hearing, Belinda testified that she “was not asked to take Emma along.”

She would later tell a court-appointed child advocate she “would have loved to have invited Emma to join them” but “there was not enough room in the car,” according to a report filed in mid-September.

At the end of the August hearing, Indiana Judge Stephen Galvin made no ruling on guardianship but directed the child advocate to file a report by the next hearing regarding the termination request. It would be reviewed and discussed at the next court date, slated for late September 2017.

A judge’s decision and Emma Grace’s fate

In the September report, the child advocate noted that Kristie Haas’ therapist had cited “some marital issues that needed to be addressed” between her and Brandon Haas. But the most pressing issue, the advocate wrote, was Emma Grace’s attachment to the Conley (then Stroud/Axsom) family and a lack of bonding between her and Kristie.

Emma Grace had already shown behaviors consistent with separation issues, the advocate had learned, and Kristie Haas didn’t know Emma Grace’s schedule or needs.

Given these circumstances, the advocate wrote in her report and then testified during the September hearing, in an ideal world, Kristie Haas and Emma Grace would visit together every weekend for two to three months before the guardianship was terminated.

However, because of the “considerable distance and expense and stress” associated with having to travel from Delaware to Indiana, she recommended one or two more parenting sessions, including an overnight visit.

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Yet after a brief discussion, Galvin made up his mind. He was terminating the guardianship.

Despite this decision, the judge appeared to be conflicted, court transcripts show.

Before making his ruling, he told the courtroom: “I don’t like what I’m about to order.”

Then, he said that it was “difficult for the court to find that it’s necessarily in the child’s best interests,” seemingly acknowledging that his decision flew in the face of the advocate’s recommendations and what experts say are best practices for child reunification.

“But,” he added, “I am doing (so) in the sense that it is always in the child’s best interest to be in the care – at least the Indiana law presumes so – if the parent is able to fulfill their duties as a parent. And it is clear that Ms. Haas is able to fulfill those duties at this time.”

Later that day, in the September heat, Emma Grace was returned to Kristie Haas. She screamed as she was plucked from Conley’s arms.

Could Emma Grace’s death have been prevented?

Conley has been angry since that hearing almost six years ago and was even more devastated when she learned of Emma Grace’s death. She and others, including Kristie Haas’ sister, blame Galvin for his decision that day, saying it set in motion the toddler’s abuse.

Yet they also question what those in Delaware knew, and whether authorities had any way of learning of or stopping the abuse.

The sentencing memorandum provides some answers, including that Delaware child protective services were called in June 2018 by a neighbor, who said they’d seen three of the four children outside of the Newark home Kristie and Brandon Haas were renting.

They were unattended, the caller said, with one naked and another in only their underwear. The reporting party was also concerned about the “strong odor of marijuana” coming from the house and loud music blasting from the home.

“The caller felt the children were small for their ages and recounted a situation where one of the children was dropped off from school and no parent was present,” prosecutors wrote in the memo.

The caller, who knew the Haas’ landlord, also said the couple was six months behind in rent and that an inspection of the house had revealed holes in the walls, two puppies, and four cats. The home also smelled of urine, the caller said.

The children were all living in one bedroom in the three-bedroom house, the caller added, and another bedroom was used only for storage.

Yet by the time Delaware Division of Family Service workers tried to make a home visit a month later, Brandon and Kristie Haas had been evicted and moved to Smyrna. The caseworker didn’t find the family for almost four months.

In October 2018, the caseworker obtained medical records for the four children and “noted no concerns,” prosecutors wrote, aside from a single no-show doctor’s appointment for Emma Grace.

“But underneath the surface,” prosecutors wrote, “this single no-show appointment, on August 13, 2018, was the beginning of a long pattern of selective medical neglect of Emma at Defendant’s hands.”

Records show that after May 2018, Emma Grace had no medical appointments. Meanwhile, Kristie and Brandon Haas were abusing and starving her.

Still, Emma Grace and her siblings weren't cut off from the world completely.

The toddler’s two sisters attended school that fall, though they had numerous attendance issues, prosecutors wrote. In one instance in late October, one of the children also came to school without a winter coat, prompting her teacher to try to find one for her from the lost and found.

It’s unclear what became of that incident.

In December, however, district staff conducted a home visit as a result of the truancy issues. While it’s also unclear what resulted from that visit, by January 2019, Kristie Haas had been granted permission to begin homeschooling the eldest girls.

As the outside world slowly lost contact with the children, so too did Brandon Haas’ mother, prosecutors wrote.

Up until late 2018 or early 2019 – when Emma Grace began appearing noticeably thinner, according to photos of the girl – Brandon Haas’ mother was “robustly engaged” in the children’s care. She and her partner had even offered to take Emma Grace from Brandon and Kristie Haas’ care and raise her for them, prosecutors wrote.

A TIMELINE: The life and death of Emma Grace Cole: A timeline — and what's next

Yet the Haases declined the offer, and later, “due to a perceived disagreement” with her son and daughter-in-law, Brandon Haas’ mother told investigators that “Emma and the children were isolated away from her.”

Over the summer of 2019, she told investigators she “had no further interaction with Emma, with whom she had a prior close and loving relationship.”

With most, if not all, authorities shut out, there was no one to step in and advocate for Emma Grace or her siblings. To make matters worse, after the girl's “disappearance,” the children were instructed not to mention their youngest sister, prosecutors said.

“When (she) would try to ask KH about Emma, KH would shake and get scared and tell not to talk about Emma,” the doctor wrote in her report.

By the time Kristie and Brandon Haas were located and arrested in a hotel in Pennsylvania, Emma Grace’s siblings were thin and suffering from malnutrition, with “significant dental decay.”

While they have since recovered physically, Kristie and Brandon Haas "inflicted deep psychological trauma on Emma’s siblings,” prosecutors wrote in the sentencing memorandum, adding that her "acts destroyed more lives than Emma’s alone."

As for Emma Grace, prosecutors said Kristie Haas had options − none of which she chose to take.

"She could have turned to her family’s or Brandon’s for help. She could have surrendered Emma. She could have offered her for adoption," prosecutors wrote. "Instead, she starved her, beat her, tortured her and deprived her of medical care.

"Her campaign of abuse caused the death of an innocent three-year-old girl."

Kristie Haas remains in prison, while Brandon Haas is out on bail. They will be sentenced jointly next month.

Got a story tip or idea? Send to Isabel Hughes at ihughes@delawareonline.com. For all things breaking news, follow her on Twitter at @izzihughes_

This article originally appeared on Delaware News Journal: Emma Grace Cole murder: Court documents show toddler was tortured