Three Missionaries, Including American Couple, Killed by Gang in Haiti

Three missionaries, including a married couple from the US, were killed in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, on Thursday evening.

Davy and Natalie Lloyd “were attacked by gangs this evening and were both killed,” Natalie Lloyd’s father, Missouri state Rep. Ben Baker, said in a Facebook post. “They went to Heaven together.”

“Please pray for my family we desperately need strength. And please pray for the Lloyd family as well,” Baker said.

Mission director Jude Montis, 45, was also killed. All three worked for Missions in Haiti, Inc., which has been operated by Davy Lloyd’s parents for more than two decades, according to the group’s website.

Davy Lloyd, 23, had a “love for Haiti,” his father David Lloyd told CNN. “His first language was Creole. He used to tell us when he was little that someday he was going to be a missionary in Haiti.”

He and Natalie Lloyd, 21, were ambushed as they left church in Port-au-Prince on Thursday evening, according to David Lloyd.

“Davy was taken to the house tied up and beat. The gang then took our trucks and loaded everything up they wanted and left,” a post on Missions in Haiti’s Facebook page said.

Three hours later, the organization posted that the three missionaries “were shot and killed by the gang about 9 o’clock this evening. We all are devastated.”

It’s still unclear how exactly the missionaries were killed. The investigation into the killings is ongoing, and Haitian police have not yet released any details on them.

Local emergency response service Haitian Emergency Response Operations (HERO) assisted in coordinating and managing the operation to retrieve the bodies and transport the remains of the American couple to a hospital morgue.

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He remembered the couple as people who put others before themselves, telling CNN Friday evening that he commends their bravery.

“I don’t think you can find a better example of people who truly had a deep love for the people of Haiti and had a vision to help them in anyway that they could and made such an impact there among the different ministries they were involved in,” Baker told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on “The Source.”

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David Lloyd told CNN that he was on the phone with his son during the attacks.

The mission and church across the street have two security guards, but when the 23-year-old came out of the church around 6 p.m., “three pick-up trucks full of guys with guns overwhelmed them immediately,” he said.

The armed men dragged Davy Lloyd to the house, tied him up, and started looting the compound, according to his father, who said children from the orphanage were in the compound at the time.

After the gang left with its haul, Davy Lloyd called his father.

“He was injured, and he was hurt. He was nervous, and very very scared,” David Lloyd said. “He was begging me to find someone to get in there and help him, and I did all I could but I couldn’t locate anybody.”

Then more armed men arrived, he said.

“He told me, ‘I have to go down, something else is going down. I gotta go see what it is,’” David Lloyd recalled. “That was basically our last call.”

Around that time, someone shot one of the newly arrived gang members, sparking a violent backlash, he said.

“Davy went in and barricaded himself in my personal home with his wife and (mission director) Jude Montis. The gang shot that place up until they got the door busted down and shot them, and set Davy and Jude on fire.”

HERO, the ambulance service, confirmed to CNN that Davy Lloyd’s body was found burned at the scene.

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On Missions in Haiti’s website, Davy Lloyd can be seen talking about growing up in the Caribbean nation and doing manual labor on the mission compound. He previously survived a kidnapping in Port-au-Prince in 2005, when he was just 5 years old, his father said.

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