Sonja Kull did not think that Thursday would be the last day she’d see her daughter alive.
Less than two weeks after giving birth to a baby girl at Concord Hospital, Jeanne Seto, 36, was fatally shot by law enforcement in Bath on the evening of Oct. 8. Authorities said Seto was armed with a handgun during a confrontation involving a vehicle pursuit. She died of multiple gunshot wounds.
“I loved her to death,” said Kull. “They shot my child, execution style.”
According to Kull, Seto was on her way from Concord to Bath, where Kull lives, intending to kill her mother after a dispute that morning. After police were alerted, they stopped Seto’s vehicle south of the intersection of Route 112 and Route 302. Authorities said they could not get Seto to comply with commands, and officers then fired the shots that killed her.
That same morning, Kull filed for temporary guardianship of the newborn, and a judge granted her the order.
To Kull, it didn’t have to end that way. She believes the night could have gone in a very different direction if law enforcement had acted differently, and if they had seen Seto as more than a woman living on the streets of Concord and not a “street urchin”
With Seto’s history of mental illness and the newborn’s arrival on Oct. 2, Kull said she agreed on Monday to take them in temporarily after child protective services did not want Seto to take her baby to live on the streets.
Seto, her husband, Ashton, and the baby moved into Kull’s Bath home on Oct. 5. For a few days, Kull said, all was well.
That changed Thursday morning, when Seto was in the grip of a mental health crisis.
“She wasn’t getting the sleep; she was trying to play Super Mom,” Kull said. “She was worried that everybody was watching her and how she was caring for the baby.”
That fear, Kull said, had deep roots.
Emotions reached a high when Seto accused Kull of stealing her husband’s firearm, for which she had been searching. Kull said she had locked the gun away when the family arrived, at the request of Seto’s husband, for safety.
After the accusation, Kull said she didn’t want to get in trouble and slipped the locked box to Seto’s husband.
Soon after, Seto packed up her family and left Bath for Concord. Once they left, Kull called the police.
“I was already concerned for Jeanne,” Kull said. “But when she left with the baby, I was that much more concerned.”
After Kull explained the situation, police told her to file an ex parte order with the court in Haverhill. With that order, she was able to get Concord police to intercept the family on Loudon Road.
Missed opportunities
For Kull, what happened in Concord was an utter failure.
She said officers knew Seto. They knew she was a mother, and they knew her history of mental illness. Yet, Kull said, they did little upon intercepting Seto in Concord: no transfer to a hospital, no search of the vehicle for a firearm. They took the newborn, handed her to child protective services, and let Seto and her husband drive away, she said.
“They really like to point around that she is homeless,” Kull said. “She had mental illness, and she struggled, and she fought, and she tried. She was a beautiful person.”
Kull said if Concord police had transferred her to a hospital, things could have been different.
After that, Kull said, everything moved so fast.
She was at the child protective services office just up the road when her son-in-law called, she said. Seto had taken off without him. She had smashed open the lockbox, grabbed the gun, and was heading to kill Kull. Seto’s mother doesn’t know where the lockbox was when this occurred.
“Her baby had just been taken; she saw no hope,” Kull said. “I took her baby, but not with the idea I was taking her baby. I was just taking the baby until Jeannie could get herself some help.”
A staff member at the office alerted police while Kull waited with the authorities to get diapers for her granddaughter, she said.
According to a press release from the New Hampshire Office of the Attorney General, police located Seto around 7:04 p.m. on Route 112 heading toward Bath. They deployed a spike strip and stopped her vehicle.
While the investigation remains ongoing, many questions remain unanswered. The police departments and officers involved have not been named, and it is still unknown who fired first.
Kull believes officers had other options than just to shoot her daughter 10 miles away from her home in Bath.
They could have stopped Seto in the middle of the White Forest, she said, where Seto was no danger to anyone, and then talked her down.
“She was a mother to a newborn,” said Kull. “They executed my daughter like she was a damn animal.”
Now, with her twelve-day-old granddaughter beside her, Kull said she sees Seto in every smile the baby gives. The court order shows that Kull’s guardianship of her granddaughter expires on December 07, 2026.
She can’t stop counting the points of intervention, from the hospital to the moment Seto was shot, that might have kept her daughter alive.
“Jeannie didn’t get any justice. They failed her,” Kull said.
