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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.