A year after her 16-year-old daughter died while in the care of the state, a Maryland mother is suing the governor, a massive hotel chain and more than a dozen other defendants, arguing that they failed to protect the child before she died by suicide and then failed to hold the responsible parties accountable after her death.
The lawsuit is the latest attempt to seek accountability on behalf of Kanaiyah Ward, who died of a drug overdose in September 2025 while staying in a Marriott Residence Inn hotel room she had been placed in by Maryland’s foster care system.
Her death, which was ruled a suicide, spurred change. Even though they had promised for months to stop placing foster children in hotels, Maryland officials appeared to accelerate those efforts after Kanaiyah’s death, rapidly removing all young people from hotel placements within weeks of the tragedy. Months later, Maryland lawmakers passed legislation, including a bill named after Kanaiyah, to reform Maryland’s troubled foster care system.
But the lawsuit, filed Tuesday, argues that those changes could and should have happened sooner and seeks damages for civil rights violations and wrongful death claims, among others.
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“They killed my child,” said Kanaiyah’s mother, Brooke Ward, at a news conference Wednesday. “She was unwatched.”
Kanaiyah was supposed to be checked on every hour, and she was not supposed to be able to access medication freely. But 911 records indicate that when she was found, more than four hours after her last check-in, her body was cold and pill bottles were scattered nearby, according to the lawsuit.
The complaint also says Marriott should never have been housing at-risk young people in the first place and could have done more to keep Kanaiyah safe. And Ward’s lawyers argue that the criminal investigation of the involved parties should have been more thorough.
“Every institution with a hand in Kanaiyah’s care knew what she needed, and every one of them failed her,” the lawsuit says. “This case is about the breadth of that failure — a failure that ran from the Governor’s office in Annapolis to Marriott’s headquarters in Bethesda.”
Marriott did not respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.
Lillian Price, a spokesperson for Maryland’s Department of Human Services, said the department could not comment on the specifics of the litigation, citing privacy protections. But Price pointed to the changes Maryland had made to its child welfare system over the past several years.
“We remain committed to strengthening and reforming child welfare in Maryland and will not rest until every child in our state is safe, thriving in a permanent home, and surrounded by a loving family,” Price said in an emailed statement.
Kanaiyah had lived with her mother and her grandparents before a Maryland juvenile court placed her in the custody of the Prince George’s County Department of Social Services. She had a history of self-harm and suicide attempts along with complex, debilitating challenges with her mental health, the lawsuit says.
“I couldn’t take care of her,” Brooke Ward said, “so I gave her to the state.”
After being discharged from a residential program and refused by other facilities, Kanaiyah was placed in a Residence Inn in Baltimore. A company called Fenwick Behavioral Services had a contract with the state to supervise foster children there. Eric Fenwick, the CEO of the company, said Kanaiyah’s death was a tragedy but his company was not to blame. “We did everything that we possibly could,” he said.
Ward said she voiced concerns about the arrangement but was told it was the only option for her daughter at the time. Now, her lawsuit argues that the placement decision actually put Maryland in violation of the terms of a 1988 federal consent decree.
The lawsuit alleges that Kanaiyah was failed by both Fenwick and the worker charged with watching her that morning. Kanaiyah was not checked hourly, as Fenwick’s rules stipulated, and she was somehow allowed to access enough diphenhydramine, the active ingredient in Benadryl, to kill her, according to the complaint.
The worker charged with caring for her had been working more than 40 hours straight when Kanaiyah died, according to a Maryland state investigation. Her assignment had been extended after a replacement worker fell ill, the state’s report said.
Citing a 911 call recording, the lawsuit said Kanaiyah’s caregiver refused to provide the girl with emergency medical care. When the 911 operator offered to instruct her how to perform CPR, the caregiver declined, the complaint says. DeMaurice Smith, a family member of Kanaiyah’s and one of the lawyers on the case, said it was “one of the most chilling things I have ever heard — and I was a homicide prosecutor for 10 years.”
The lawsuit also lays blame at the feet of Marriott, arguing that the hotel chain allowed the franchised location where Kanaiyah was housed to remain in poor condition and failed to make sure the hotel operators were following proper safety protocols. Notably, the lawsuit also argues that the company continues to make money off of foster care placements in other states.
“Marriott still allows disabled foster care children to be housed in its nearly 6,000 hotels across the remaining states where the warehousing of foster children has not yet been made illegal,” the lawsuit says.
Maryland prosecutors declined to charge anyone criminally in connection with Kanaiyah’s death. But Smith, who previously worked as a D.C. prosecutor, argues that the state’s investigation was incomplete. He has commissioned his own outside investigation, which he said he will release in the coming weeks.
“We will serve that report on the prosecutor who should have done his job,” Smith said.
On Wednesday, Ward wore a pink T-shirt with a photo of Kanaiyah printed on it. Her arms were tattooed with markings of her grief: Kanaiyah’s birth and death date, her case number and her nickname, “KK.”
“Kanaiyah,” she said, “was my only child.”
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