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27067: Hermantin(News)Abduction: Two mothers' living nightmare (fwd)
Posted on Tue, Jan. 03, 2006
Miami Herald
HAITI
Abduction: Two mothers' living nightmare
Last week, two kidnapped Americans and their families struggled to pool ransom
money, navigate heated negotiations and somehow maintain hope.
BY CARA BUCKLEY
cbuckley@MiamiHerald.com
This has to be a joke, she thought. A sick joke, sure, but a joke nonetheless.
It was two days before New Year's Eve and Leigh Somerville McMillan was
standing in her home in Winston-Salem, N.C., listening to her 30-year old son's
voice message, crackling from a distant phone in a fearsome land 1,280 miles
away.
''I've been kidnapped,'' her son, Frank Eaton, a documentary filmmaker, said.
''It was too horrible to believe,'' McMillan, a freelance writer, recalled. But
by the end of Eaton's somber message, she realized it was no joke. Her son had
been snatched from the streets of Port-au-Prince with a friend. Trying to
swallow back panic, MacMillan dialed the number he had left.
Abductions like the ones last Wednesday of Eaton and his friend, Alain
Maximilien, 33, a DJ born in the U.S. and raised in Haiti who goes by the name
the ''Haitian Hillbilly,'' have become so routine in Haiti that a day doesn't
go by without 10 people disappearing from its streets.
UNSEEN VICTIMS
But for parents and friends of kidnapping victims, and indeed the victims
themselves, the entire ordeal is at once terrifyingly personal and deeply
surreal.
If your loved one happens to be a U.S. citizen, you'll find yourself dealing
with U.S. Embassy officials and the FBI. If you're not wealthy, you might have
to drain your savings, accept donations from co-workers and max out credit
cards, just like Alain's mother, Chris, did, to try to get the ransom money
together in time.
''I think any stress, a parent can go through it,'' said Chris Maximilien from
her Kendall home Monday, a day after her son's release. ``But when it comes to
your child's life, there's no comparison. It's your worst fear.''
Gunmen surrounded Maximilien and Eaton's car around 8 p.m. Wednesday, after the
pair left a favorite bar, and drove them to a shanty in the violent
Port-au-Prince slum of Cité Soleil. The captives were shoved into a
10-by-10-foot room that immediately filled with a dozen armed men, who shouted
taunts, smoked plenty of joints and drew their fingers across their necks.
Heady with glee and stoned, some of the kidnappers drifted to sleep, and others
arrived to keep guard.
Curiously, Maximilien was allowed virtually unfettered access to his cell
phone. He called his father, Leslie Maximilien, who he lives with in
Port-au-Prince. Then he called his friends back at the bar. Though rampant
kidnappings have long gripped Port-au-Prince, Maximilien's friends were
terrified that they too were targets. Some of them spent the night in the bar.
Chris Maximilien was at work Wednesday night, as an emergency room nurse in
Jackson South Community Hospital, when her youngest son called with the news
about Alain.
She would not sleep for the next four nights, or stop smoking Benson and Hedges
mentholated cigarettes, or wander more than a few feet from the phone.
In Winston-Salem, after hearing her son's message Thursday morning, Leigh
McMillan tried to call Leslie Maximilien, Alain's father and Chris' ex-husband,
but couldn't get through. Her younger son called the FBI. An agent soon showed
up at McMillan's door to help with negotiations.
In Port-au-Prince, Leslie Maximilien contacted a negotiator recommended by
friends to get his son back. The abductors first demanded $2 million, but by
Thursday night agreed on $20,000. Family members and friends pooled their
savings. The negotiator set off into the night with the money, in cash, and
disappeared. No trace of him, or the money, has surfaced yet.
In the shanty in Cité Soleil, Maximilien, who is fluent in Creole, tried to
charm the kidnappers while Eaton, whose grip on Creole is shaky at best, mostly
sat silent. Sometimes the kidnappers pointed empty pistols at the men, and
pretended to shoot. They told Maximilien they might kill Eaton to prove how
serious they were. Maximilien didn't tell Eaton what they'd said.
Friday dawned. A Miami Herald article about the abductions drew Maximilien's
old friends out of the woodwork, people from his old Boca Raton boarding
school, and they all called his mother en masse. At Mac's Club Deuce, a gritty
bar in South Beach, Maximilien's old drinking buddies raised a toast in his
name. In Winston-Salem, the McMillan household bulged with stricken family
members and friends.
Leslie Maximilien found another negotiator. The man arrived in Cité Soleil with
the $9,000 demanded by the kidnappers, but the person he handed it over to
stole the loot. Maximilien and Eaton believed it would be their last night in
captivity, and so did their kidnappers. They brought the hostages Haitian
cigarettes, bottled water and seven beers, and spent the evening casually
chatting and teaching Eaton Creole phrases like ''si Dieu vlé,'' or ``if God
wills.''
DOUBLE-CROSSED
Saturday. Leslie Maximilien found a third negotiator who arrived in Cité Soleil
with $10,000, as demanded. But the kidnappers, perhaps believing they could
squeeze out more for Maximilien, only released Eaton, who was whisked out of
Cité Soleil.
Chris Maximilien phoned Leigh McMillan to tell her how glad she was for her,
but then any hope she had left for Alain evaporated. Then Alain called, lifting
her spirits. Her other children were with her. New Year's Eve passed in
silence.
Meanwhile, in Cité Soleil, a gang leader told Maximilien he would celebrate New
Year's Eve with him by picking up girls, but ended up getting too drunk to go
out. Maximilien also found out that one of the kidnappers had gone out
joyriding and totaled his car.
Sunday. After learning -- erroneously, as it turned out -- that the kidnappers
wanted another $10,000, Chris Maximilien frantically reached out to her family
in Pittsburgh, her friends and her co-workers at Jackson South to cobble
together enough.
But it was New Year's Day, and nearly every wire transfer office was closed.
She and her stepdaughter, Joanne, found an open Publix in Doral, but its
Western Union office didn't have $10,00 to send. A Western Union office at a
Hialeah Publix could handle the transfer. But it was also New Year's Day in
Haiti. Everything was closed. There was nowhere to wire the money to.
In Port-au-Prince, Leslie Maximilien again tapped friends and family for help.
As it turned out, the kidnappers wanted another $3,400. The negotiator went to
Cité Soleil with the cash and, as demanded, a radio and ten pairs of running
shoes. A fourth negotiator handled the final release.
As evening fell, Maximilien was lead from the shanty on foot. United Nation
forces were exchanging machine gunfire with other armed men, uninvolved in his
kidnapping, so the going was treacherous.
Finally, he was ferried by a motorcycle taxi to the edge of Cité Soleil. A
driver from his house met him, and took him home.
''It didn't really hit me until I was home in my own bathroom,'' said
Maximilien. ``I didn't believe it until I saw myself in the mirror.''
Chris Maximilien shook when she got the news. Eaton, flooded with relief,
congratulated Alain by phone, then arranged his own trip back to North
Carolina. He was slated to arrive there Monday night but, to his family's deep
dismay, wants to go back to Haiti in February.
Alain Maximilien doesn't plan to leave Port-au-Prince. Instead, he plans to
return to his radio show and spread the word about the conditions in Cité
Soleil. He's even been in touch already with one of the kidnappers, because
he's trying to get back his laptop, which was in the car.
A friend of his, Ashley Swanson, designed two T-shirts to memorialize the
ordeal. ''Got ransom?'' reads one, while the other reads, ''My friend got
kidnapped and all he got me was this lousy T-shirt.'' Their printing is already
in the works.