John Jefferson
Left: Haley Metz (Etowah County Sheriff’s Office). Right: Aydah DiMaso (GoFundMe).
An Alabama woman has, after a long delay, accepted legal culpability for the blunt force trauma death of her 3-year-old stepdaughter.
Haley Dee Metz, 33, entered a blind plea this week on one count of aggravated child abuse — meaning that the range of her eventual sentence was not hashed out as part of her plea deal.
In exchange for pleading guilty, prosecutors in Etowah County agreed to drop one count of conspiracy to commit aggravated assault.
Metz’s admission of guilt is the penultimate chapter in the dual criminal cases against the stepmother and father of Aydah DiMaso, 3, who died nearly three years ago. Meanwhile, a civil case against child welfare authorities is likely to go on for months, if not years, to come.
In early October 2021, family members phoned the police to request a welfare check at a residence in Gadsden after finding the girl unresponsive in a bathtub. Responding Gadsden Police Department officers noted the girl was deceased at the scene of the crime.
Her father, Nikolas Joseph DiMaso, 26, was almost immediately taken into custody. Investigators quickly put together a case against DiMaso, alleging he used his “hands and/or fists” to beat the girl to death, according to charging documents obtained by AL.com.
While exact details of the child’s violent death have not been released in full, law enforcement later revealed that Aydah had over 50 signs of trauma throughout her body.
“Aydah was a sweet soul with an infectious giggle, loved deeply by her Grandparents who had been fighting for custody of her,” a GoFundMe for the girl’s family reads. “The system let her down, and so sadly, this tragedy was utterly preventable. As friends and colleagues of the family, it’s our hope that we can rally together to help a grief stricken family at this horrific time with the costs of Aydah’s memorial and to fund a trust to ensure that the family can get #JusticeForAydah.”
In October 2023, Aydah’s estate, led by her maternal grandmother, filed a long-expected lawsuit against the Alabama Department of Human Resources, alleging the Yellowhammer State system needlessly subjected the vulnerable girl to horrific and fatal violence.
The lawsuit names the overarching state agency and several others — including four individual case workers — as defendants and claims they violated laws, misinterpreted them, or acted negligently in ways that “proximately caused” the toddler’s death, according to a copy of the original petition obtained by The Gadsden Times.
“All these agencies touched and were warned that this poor child was suffering and she needed to get out of that house and out of that situation and they failed her completely and as a result, this tragedy occurred,” plaintiffs attorney Tommy James said in comments to Birmingham-based Fox affiliate WBRC earlier this year. “She had a broken left arm that was healing, she had a gash in her foot, and she literally had marks up and down her whole body. What this child suffered from is just horrific, you can’t even imagine.”
Nikolas DiMaso (Alabama Department of Corrections).
On June 14, DiMaso was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison without the possibility of parole after pleading guilty to one count each of capital murder of a child under 14 and conspiracy to commit aggravated child abuse, according to WBRC.
Metz’s sentencing hearing is slated for November.
The girl had only been in her father’s custody for some eight months before she died, according to court documents obtained by AL.com. Before that, her grandparents fought to retain custody — but did not succeed.
“She knows I won’t rest until I know that her death was not in vain,’’ the victim’s grandmother said in the days after her death. “I want everyone to know how hard we fought to keep her safe, how the system failed us on every level and how so many other families all over the country are going through the same hurt dealing with this horrible system. We are going to fight this to the end. Believe that.”
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