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28061: Hermantin(News)Killing was political, daughter fears (fwd)
Lhermantin@hotmail.com
Killing was political, daughter fears
Slain father was guard at embassy for U.S. in Haiti
By Alva James-Johnson
South Florida Sun-Sentinel
March 3, 2006
Shirley Polo spoke to her father at 8:20 p.m. Wednesday via a telephone call
from Haiti.
When she woke in Lake Worth the next morning, she learned that her father was
dead.
Ernest Polo was one of two security guards with the U.S. Embassy in Haiti
gunned down in a Port-au-Prince neighborhood, according to Polo and her family.
Polo, 24, said she fled to Lake Worth in July because of her affiliation with a
political party called Mobilization for Progress in Haiti, whose leader
unsuccessfully campaigned for the presidency. In recent months, Polo said,
opponents of the party have threatened her.
She said her mother, Polene Tergene Polo, 47, and her sister, Tagie, 18, joined
her in January, leaving her father and four other siblings behind.
Shirley Polo said they all feared for their lives because of her political
ties, and she thinks members of Lavalas, the political party of former
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, killed her father.
Aristide was ousted from the country in a bloody rebellion two years ago. While
he remains exiled in South Africa, his former protégé René Préval is the newly
elected president of Haiti.
"I feel like everything is on my shoulders," she said through a translator
Thursday. "It's because of me my father died."
Officials at the U.S. State Department could not be reached Thursday to confirm
the murders. But a leader of Mobilization for Progress and a member of a
Lavalas organization in Miami both discounted Polo's claims.
Samir Mourra, a former Miami businessman who heads Mobilization for Progress in
Haiti and was a staunch opponent of Aristide, said Thursday he doesn't think
Polo's affiliation with his organization has anything to do with the shootings.
"I don't see why they would target them because of my party," said the former
presidential candidate now living in Haiti. "We haven't received any
retaliation whatsoever. Many of the people who are with Préval were with me.
Our party has a lot of Lavalas members in it."
Lavarice Gaudin, chairman of Veye Yo, a Lavalas organization in Miami, said he
wouldn't be surprised if some people orchestrate crimes in the country to
undermine the Préval government.
"Soon you'll see many killings going on just to put the blame on Lavalas," he
said.
The latest murders unsettled Haitians in South Florida, where Haitian radio
stations, including Radio Mega 1020 AM in North Miami Beach, broadcast reports
of the incident.
Alex Saint Surin, the station's general manager, said correspondents from Haiti
reported that the bodies of two U.S. Embassy security guards had been found in
Port-au-Prince Wednesday night.
Shirley Polo's cousin, Firmann Dorvilus of Lake Worth, said one of Polo's
sisters in Haiti told them that someone had found Ernest Polo's body on the
ground, stripped of his cell phone and jewelry.
Polo said her father, who worked with the U.S. Embassy for eight years, was on
his way home from the U.S. ambassador's house with the other security guard
when the shooting occurred. She said her father was stopped on the road, and
shot in the neck, heart and stomach.
Alva James-Johnson can be reached at ajjohnson@sun-sentinel.com or
954-356-4523.
Copyright © 2006, South Florida Sun-Sentinel