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Three missionaries, including an American married couple, were killed in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, on Thursday evening.
Dewey and Natalie Lloyd “were attacked by gangs this evening and both were murdered,” 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 need a lot of strength. And please pray for the Lloyd family as well,” Baker said.
Mission director Jude Montis, 45, also was killed. All three worked for Mission in Haiti, Inc., which Dewey Lloyd’s parents have run for more than two decades, according to the group’s website.
Dewey Lloyd, 23, “loved Haiti so much,” his father, David Lloyd, told CNN. “His first language was Creole. When he was little, he used to tell us that one day he would be a missionary in Haiti.”
According to David Lloyd, he and 21-year-old Natalie Lloyd were ambushed while leaving a church in Port-au-Prince on Thursday evening.
“Davy was taken into a home, tied up, and beaten,” a post on Mission in Haiti’s Facebook page said. “The gang then took our trucks, loaded them with everything they needed and left.”
Three hours later, the organization posted that three missionaries were “shot and killed by a gang tonight around 9 p.m. We are all shocked.”
It is still unclear how the missionaries were killed. The murders are under investigation, and Haiti police have not yet released any details about them.
Haitian Emergency Response Operations (HERO), a local emergency response service, assisted in coordinating and managing the operation to recover the bodies and transport the American couple’s remains to the hospital morgue.
“Right now we are working to recover the bodies of Natalee and Davey,” Baker said on social media Friday night. He added that the effort will involve obtaining waivers. “After that, we will have to find an airline that is willing to transport. Praying that all goes smoothly.”
He remembered the couple as people who put others before themselves, and told CNN on Friday evening that he admired their bravery.
“I don’t think you could find a better example of someone who really had a deep love for the people of Haiti and who wanted to help them in any way that he could and made such an impact in the various ministries that he was involved with,” Baker told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on “The Source.”
David Lloyd told CNN he was on the phone with his son during the attacks.
He said the mission and the church across the street have two security guards, but when the 23-year-old came out of the church about 6 p.m., he was “immediately attacked by three pickup trucks full of men with guns.”
According to his father, the armed men dragged Davey Lloyd into the house, tied him up and began looting the premises. He said children from the orphanage were also inside the premises at the time.
When the gang had left with their goods, Davy Lloyd called his father.
“He was injured and hurt. He was nervous and very scared,” David Lloyd said. “He was begging me to find somebody to go in and help him and I tried everything I could but I couldn’t find anybody.”
He said that after this more armed men arrived there.
“He said to me, ‘I’ve got to go down, there’s something else going on. I’ve got to go and see what it is,'” David Lloyd recalled. “That was basically our last call.”
Around the same time, he said, someone shot a member of the newly arrived gang, sparking a violent reaction.
“Davy went in and broke into my private home with his wife and (mission director) Jude Montis. The gang shot up the place until they broke down the door and shot them down, and Davy and Jude were set on fire.”
Ambulance service HERO confirmed to CNN that the body of Davey Lloyd was found burned at the scene.
Haiti police will work closely with international law enforcement agencies to investigate the killings, police spokesman Gary Desrosiers told CNN on Friday.
“This is an open investigation but we are confident we will arrest those involved. At the moment, we are working on protecting the public and the community while actively searching for the offenders,” he said.
On the Mission in Haiti website, Dewey Lloyd can be seen talking about growing up in the Caribbean country and doing physical labor on the mission compound. His father said he previously survived a kidnapping in Port-au-Prince in 2005 when he was just 5 years old.
According to a report in the Tulsa World newspaper that year, Dewey Lloyd, his sister and foster sister were kidnapped in a carjacking while returning home from school. But according to the report, police were able to track down the kidnappers, rescue the children and quickly return them to their parents.
“We got him back 21 hours later,” David Lloyd recalled.
In a statement to CNN on Friday, the White House said it was aware of the reports and expressed condolences and called for the immediate deployment of a UN Security Council-approved international police force to the region.
“We are aware of reports of deaths of American citizens in Haiti. We offer our condolences to the families of those killed as they experience unimaginable grief,” a national security spokesperson told CNN.
“The security situation in Haiti cannot be prolonged much longer. That is why yesterday President Biden reiterated our commitment to support the rapid deployment of the Multinational Security Assistance (MSS) mission to bolster the capabilities of the Haiti National Police to protect civilians, restore the rule of law, and pave the way for democratic governance.”
Missouri’s Republican governor, Mike Parson, also mourned the couple’s death Friday morning, calling it “very heartbreaking news.”
So far, the area around the Mission to Haiti campus has felt largely safe, despite the violence in the rest of the city, according to David Lloyd, who was in the country until a few days ago.
“We haven’t actually heard any gunshots in this case. Our school is open, the church is working, the bakery is selling bread every day,” he said.
Lloyd said that when flights resumed to Toussaint Louverture International Airport in Port-au-Prince last week, he asked his son and daughter-in-law if they wanted to leave Haiti, but they declined.
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“We know the situation in Haiti is very volatile, we know it’s dangerous,” he said. “But we had a good relationship with the groups in our area, and they left us alone. But from what I understand, it was an outside group that initially came in from about a mile away that started all of this.”
Natalie Lloyd’s father told CNN that the couple did not leave the house, even when they had the opportunity to do so, because of the care of their children.
“They made the decision to stay, even when things got worse, because they felt like if they left, those kids wouldn’t have any place to go,” Baker said on “The Source.”
They believe the gang’s initial attack was solely for the purpose of robbery, and that the gang were attempting to rob as much as possible before the United Nations Multinational Security Assistance Mission arrived.
“We have a very large mission complex, a lot of stuff. With international forces expected to arrive any day now, I think the gangs are trying to get as much as they can because they think they’re running out of time,” he said.
At a joint press conference with Kenyan President William Ruto on Thursday, Biden defended the decision not to deploy U.S. troops to Haiti, telling reporters that doing so “would raise all kinds of questions that could easily be misrepresented by what we’re trying to do, and could be used by those who disagree with us and against the interests of Haiti and the United States,” while he pointed to the material assistance, including equipment and training, that the U.S. has already provided to deal with the crisis.
The mission’s Facebook feed in Haiti has told the story of increasingly dire conditions in the country this year. “Gangs are still fighting for more control and chaos reigns,” the organization posted on April 23. “It seems the world has turned its back on Haiti and it is going to be completely under the control of gangs.”
This story and headline have been updated with additional details.
CNN’s Donald Judd and Kanita Iyer contributed to this report.
