The New Hampshire Supreme Court spent thirty minutes on Tuesday hearing arguments in a case that could reshape the legal exposure of every police department in the state when officers respond, repeatedly, to a home where children are being abused. The plaintiff, Olivia Griffin, has already won nearly $30 million in damages from the adoptive parents who tortured her through most of her childhood. The question now before the justices is whether the New Boston Police Department — which responded to her home over and over again across nearly a decade — can also be held financially accountable for what they did not see and did not stop, as reported by NHPR.
It is one of the most consequential police-liability cases the New Hampshire Supreme Court has heard in years, and the framing of the legal test the justices ultimately adopt will affect how police chiefs across the state train officers, document calls, and decide when to escalate a domestic-disturbance call into a child-protection investigation.
The Underlying Case
The facts of what happened to Olivia Griffin inside her adoptive parents’ home in New Boston have been laid out in lower-court filings and in the lengthy testimony she delivered in superior court. Adopted by Thomas and Denise Atkocaitis, Griffin grew up in a household that judges and jurors have since described as so depraved that the dollar value of the harm — the nearly $30 million awarded by Superior Court Judge John Kissinger — barely begins to capture it. She was confined to a windowless basement room. She was deprived of food. She was subjected to relentless psychological abuse. The state Division of Children, Youth and Families would later settle with her for an undisclosed sum, an admission that the agency’s failure to act was as much a part of her childhood as the violence itself.
Police were called to the home in 2007, and twice in 2009, on reports of domestic violence and child and elder abuse — abuse against other members of the household, not Griffin specifically. In 2011, her older brother told authorities about the conditions inside the home, including the windowless basement room, the food deprivation and the psychological taunting. In 2015, Griffin, then 12 years old, jumped from a second-floor window to escape, ran to a neighboring town, and was returned to the home by New Boston police. Three years later, in 2018, she was 15 when she scratched her way out of a basement room, fled, was placed in a foster home and saw criminal charges finally filed against her parents.
Thomas Atkocaitis was found guilty and served six months in jail. Denise Atkocaitis served no time at all.
Griffin, despite all of it, finished high school and graduated with honors from Plymouth State University in 2025, where she was elected class president by her classmates.
The Legal Question
The lawsuit Griffin then filed named the adoptive parents, DCYF, the Town of New Boston and seven individual New Boston police officers. The adoptive parents are obligated to pay the nearly $30 million civil judgment against them — though, like most defendants of their kind, the prospect of actually collecting that sum is largely theoretical. DCYF settled. The seven New Boston officers, however, were dismissed from the case by Judge Kissinger, who ruled they were entitled to immunity from civil liability because they did not have “actual knowledge” that Griffin was being abused.
That ruling — and the standard it rests on — is what the New Hampshire Supreme Court is now reviewing.
The plaintiff’s attorney, Michael Lewis, argued that the pattern of calls to the home was sufficient to put any reasonable officer on notice that a child living inside was at risk, regardless of whether Griffin herself ever volunteered information about the abuse to a uniform.
“Week after week, [police] left her there to be subjected to more violence and more risk of violence in the same home,” Lewis told the court.
Brian Cullen, representing the police department, took the opposite view. The officers, he argued, had no firsthand knowledge of abuse against Griffin specifically, and the record contains no suggestion that she ever disclosed abuse to any officer in 2015, when she was returned to the home after fleeing.
“What we do know is that there’s no suggestion in the record or even today, that Miss Griffin, that Olivia, provided him with any information to suggest that she had been abused,” Cullen said. He argued that police do not have a “duty to go back in time and look at the other issues” that brought officers to the address in earlier years.
That argument visibly troubled at least one of the justices. Justice Melissa Countway pressed on the 2015 incident specifically — the moment when a 12-year-old child, alone, fled to a different town to get away from her family.
“How is there no duty if you have a 12-year-old who has been located in a different town and you’re trying to figure out what to do next?” Countway asked.
Why This Matters Beyond New Boston
The standard the Supreme Court chooses to apply will reach every police department in the state. If the justices uphold Kissinger’s “actual knowledge” requirement, individual officers will be insulated from civil liability whenever a child does not directly disclose abuse to them — even when the documentary record of prior calls to the same address paints a clear pattern. If the justices reverse, police departments across New Hampshire will be on notice that prior calls to a home, particularly involving violence and children, can give rise to a duty to investigate that, if breached, exposes officers to personal civil liability.
That second outcome would ripple through department training, dispatch protocols and the tools officers use to track repeat addresses. It would also shift, on the margin, the calculus officers make in real time when they are called back to a home where they have responded before — particularly when a child is involved.
This is the same broader question raised earlier this year by the Sununu Youth Services Center staff assault and lockdown and by the long-running fight over the state Office of the Child Advocate: when the state’s child-protection apparatus fails, who bears the cost? Civil liability against police officers, in particular, has historically been a difficult avenue in New Hampshire, but the Griffin case is testing whether the bar should remain as high as it has been.
What “Actual Knowledge” Means in Practice
The “actual knowledge” standard, as Kissinger applied it, is one of the most defendant-friendly thresholds in tort law. It functionally requires a plaintiff to prove that the officer knew, with specificity, that this particular child was being abused — not that the officer should have known, not that a reasonable officer in the same circumstances would have suspected and investigated, but that the officer actually possessed that knowledge.
Plaintiffs who try to clear that bar in cases involving children almost never succeed, because children are typically the worst available witnesses to their own circumstances: too young, too afraid, too dependent, too coached. The 12-year-old who jumps out of a second-floor window and runs to a neighboring town is, by the design of that very system, generally not capable of articulating the years of conduct that drove her to it.
If the Supreme Court adopts a slightly different framing — say, a “knew or should have known” standard, or a duty triggered by a pattern of prior calls to the same address — the change is not academic. It would mean that officers in towns across the Granite State, when responding to a domestic call at an address with a documented history, are operating with a meaningfully greater set of obligations than they were before.
What Happens Next
The justices took the case under advisement at the conclusion of Tuesday’s oral argument. A decision is expected in the months ahead. If the court reverses Kissinger and reinstates the case against the seven New Boston officers, the litigation returns to superior court for a trial that would, presumably, follow much the same arc as the case against the adoptive parents themselves: extensive testimony from Griffin, documentation of the pattern of police visits, and a jury asked to put a number on the harm caused by the failure to act.
If the court affirms, the case ends. The officers walk free of civil exposure. The thirty million dollars on paper from the parents — uncollectible in any practical sense — remains the only judicial accounting Olivia Griffin will get for the years she lost.
