Posted on 02/02/2010 9:22:09 PM PST by GovernmentShrinker
Guerlaine Antoine pushed aside a tub full of laundry, wiped her soapy hands on her T-shirt and rushed barefoot to bring out photos of the 8-year-old boy she entrusted to 10 American Baptists. “Do you think I would give this child away?” she said . . .
An empty house in an unfinished subdivision in Meridian, Idaho, is listed on the nonprofit incorporation papers filed in Idaho for the organization. The address was listed in November on papers Laura Silsby filed to establish New Life as a nonprofit. Two days after the papers were filed, records show, Ms. Silsby sold the house at a substantial loss. Signs in front of the house on Tuesday offered it for sale as a foreclosed property.
The missionaries’ account of their activities in the Dominican Republic was hard to verify. They said they had been in the process of buying land and building a complex in Magante, on the north coast of the country.
Mayor Aniceto Balbuena said that he had been approached by two women about building an orphanage, but that the idea had fallen through because of a legal entanglement.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I’m confused! What were these alledged missionaries attempting to do here?
Ping!
Previous threads:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2442299/posts
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2441691/posts
Isn't it just as likely that a Baptist group went to the island to start an orphanage in the DR and when the earthquake happened they tried to rescue some of the Haitian children?
Laura Silsby is a scam artist who is in financial trouble, has a bunch of outstanding judgements against her back in the US, and is using this scheme to solicit donations, quite possibly intending to go into the lucrative business of illegal adoptions. It’s not clear that the other people in the arrested group realized what they were involved in. Information put together by Silsby had been posted on the websites of at least 2 Southern Baptist churches, leading members to trust that the operation was legitimate. The only person other than Silsby who is listed on the very recent incorporation papers for the organization running this, is Silsby’s 24 year old live-in nanny, Charisa Coulter, who may be a co-scammer, or may be a naive young woman who got sucked into helping without realizing it was an illegal scam. Oddly, there hasn’t been a word about any of Silsby’s own children — how many? what ages? where are they? where is their father? — inquiring minds want to know. If she has a live-in nanny, presumably she has children.
For background, see the previous threads I linked in the next post, especially the first one.
The biggest clue is the endless list of lies that Laura Silsby has been telling, and been caught in. Read the background in the previous threads I linked to.
Another article with new info, from the preliminary hearing that was held yesterday:
“Haiti judge quizzes US missionaries over child case”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8494841.stm
I love this part: “Ms Silsby said her group had met a Haitian pastor by chance when they arrived last week, and that he had helped them gather the children.”
So she just met this guy “by chance”, asked him to round up a bunch of children for her to take out of the country, and she really believed it was perfectly okay to just take his word for it that they were orphans and that it was perfectly legal to take them out of the country with no paperwork other than a handwritten note from this guy she’d just met by chance. Suuuurrrrrrre she believed this was all perfectly legitimate.
Keep in mind that this woman has a college degree in business, and worked for Hewlett-Packard for a number of years before starting up her own internet “personal shopper” business, that apparently had formal contracts with some major brands. This is no naive, uneducated housewife from Idaho who just wanted to help the poor Haitian children and had no idea there would be legal hurdles that needed to be cleared.
If all this is true, then I agree. GUILTY.
Wow. Didn’t see that one coming.
Anyone bringing Haitians in illegally should be jailed. Period.
One of the ten is local here in Topeka. I don’t know him; but, the local news has interviewed alot of friends from his church. He seems like a stand up guy...I dunno, maybe he was a useful idiot in the scheme.
Fifty six years in a Haitian prison will teach her a lesson.
LOL GS, you keep nailing this woman.
I still would love to see a copy of the “permission slip” she obtained from the DR government to bring undocumented children into the Country. lol
I ran a Google search eariler on < “laura silsby” -haiti, -haitian > , in other words to pick up only hits from before this gig. I couldn’t find a peep about ANY prior charitable activity except for another “non-profit” under her complete control, operating through her company “Personal Shopper”, with a hard to trace method of collecting money. And that didn’t even claim to involve any hands on work by herself or anyone affiliated with the organization. In other words, there’s no evidence she’s ever done ANY hands-on charitable work before, but now she’s suddenly starting big with buying/building her own orphanage, leading a team of volunteers to an earthquake-ravaged country to round up and “save” a busload of “orphans”, etc.
http://emagazine.ewomennetwork.com/060522_Summer/article-femtor_winners.cfm
Scroll about 2/3rds of the way down the page to “Laura Silsby – “Businesswoman
of the Year”
Running a Google search on the name of that organization, “Kids Changing Lives with the Gift of a Smile”, brings up a grand total of 11 hits, every single one of which is about collecting money and appears to have been generated by her own PR activities. Not a peep from any organization mentioning being a recipient of money from the organization, though some of the hits include a claim that the organization forwards donations to the legitimate charity “Operation Smile” (though that organization has been accused of some financial irregularities). But there is no mention of her organization, or of Personal Shopper, or of Laura Silsby on Operation Smile’s website, suggesting that it never received any significant amount of money from her organization (and quite possibly received none at all).
Scammer, scammer, scammer. May she rot in a Haitian jail for a long, long time.
Give me some nails and a hammer and put me in a room with her, and I’d be happy to *literally* nail her. It REALLY pisses me off that she’s exploiting the horrible tragedy in Haiti, and specifically the children, for her own personal gain. And it also REALLY concerns me how many FReepers instantly believed she was a saint and starting howling that the group was obviously arrested because of “hatred of Christians”, failure to bribe corrupt Haitian officials, etc.
She collects her money from people just like these easily-suckered FReepers, and that diverts money away from organizations that are actually helping. And if we’re ever going to restore a “Free Republic” in the U.S., we’d better eliminate the sucker mentality from our ranks, because as long as it’s there, it will be ruthlessly exploited by our political enemies.
I’d love to see that permission slip too. Hopefully some corrupt Haitian court official will slip a copy to the Smoking Gun for a few bucks :-) But my understanding now is that the “permission slip” was from the mysterious Haitian pastor “Jean Sanbil”, who she says gave her most of the children. She’s apparently declined to name any Dominican official who gave her any permission she previously claimed to have, and Dominican officials are denying they gave her anything of the sort.
The whole story seems a bit fishy. I don’t trust the media and I trust the Haitian government less than Rahm’s brother.
I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the missionaries were in fact just trying to rescue orphans. On the other hand, the one lady owes a couple thousand dollars so like Joe the Plumber, she is guilty of any accusation brought against her.
I’m sure many of the people involved in this thought it was legitimate. They all seemed to have learned about it from the websites and other official materials of two (or maybe more) churches that are genuinely affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, and would reasonably have trusted that their church leaders would have made sure it was legitimate before posting the information, which was soliciting money as well as volunteers. The people who volunteered and have ended up in a Haitian jail certainly got the worst of it, but I expect a whole lot of members of these churches wrote checks too, and somehow I doubt anybody but Silsby knows exactly how much money was collected.
Now it turns out that no property has ever been purchased in the Dominican Republic, and while Silsby claims to have rented a hotel that she was planning to take the children to, I don’t think there’s any evidence that the hotel has actually received any money yet. I doubt any of the donors will ever see their money again, as it’s probably all been spent on the travel, and on Silsby’s and Coulter’s personal expenses, and now on lawyers to try to get the group out of jail (though Silsby has stiffed at least one lawyer before — the largest outstanding judgement against her back in Idaho is for an unpaid bill to a law firm).
An official from the Southern Baptist Convention gave an interview yesterday, spelling out why they have clear procedures for things like this, and that neither these churches nor Silsby’s “non-profit” organization had followed the recommended procedures.
Do some background reading on Ms. Silsby and you’ll soon be putting her in the same file as the Haitian government and Rahm’s brother. I strongly suspect that most of the others in the group (except possibly Charisa Coulter) really thought they were helping with a legitimate humanitarian mission. They’ll be a lot more careful who they trust in the future.
I’m not sure how you came up with the number 56, but since it would make her 96 years old when she’s released, I guess it would do. At any rate, if she hadn’t learned her lesson by then, she’d presumably be past the point of being able to do any more damage.
Okay, so the mysterious Haitian pastor “Jean Sanbil” (whose name is actually Sainvil) has been located . . . in Gwinnett County, Georgia, where he apparently lives and has been throughout this whole saga. http://www.cbsatlanta.com/news/22414086/detail.html
I can’t tell whether he’s just totally clueless/crazy or whether he’s a scammer too, but the details of his version of the story don’t come close to matching up to Silsby’s latest version — at least in part, he may be yet another person she’s misled (among other things, it sounds like he thinks her planned orphanage in the Dominican Republic already exists). His story also doesn’t match up to the real world — he said he gave her permission to take the children out of the country, so everything should have been okay. Ummm, sure, a Haitian-born (?) pastor (apparently self-appointed and slef-employed) who lives in Georgia has authority to authorize the removal of dozens of Haitian children from Haiti. And never mind that many, if not all of the children who were on the bus were clearly not the same children Sainvil was referring to.
After reading some posts on the second page of the thread over at WebSleuths http://www.websleuths.com/forums/showthread.php?t=94653&page=2 (see posts #41-43), and this article http://www.ktvb.com/home/What-we-know-about-the-10-Americans-detained-in-Haiti-83398887.html , and finding that Sean Lankford, father/husband of two of the arrestees, works for Hewlett-Packard, Silsby’s former employer, I’m backing off my presumption that most of the people in the arrested group didn’t understand they were involved in something seriously illegal and ill-intentioned.
It’s looking like they’ve probably all known each other for a long time, and several are related by blood or marriage (at least 2 of the 3 Thompsons, Allen, and Culberth are apparently all related to each other). Coulter is reportedly Silsby’s live-in nanny, and is listed on New Life’s incorporation papers. Carla Thompson goes to the same church as Silsby, Coulter, and the Lankfords, and I’m guessing she’s also related to the other 2 Thompsons. That leaves Steve McMulle(i?)n of Twin Falls, Idaho (at 56, the oldest of the group) as the only one without any evidence suggesting a strong, pre-existing connection to anyone else in the group, though he’s reportedly a member of the Twin Falls church where Paul Thompson is pastor.
I’ll give the 2 teenagers who are each there with a parent a strong presumption of innocence until I see clear evidence to the contrary, but the 8 full-fledged adults are all solidly on my “suspect” list now. Silsby certainly appears to be the ringleader, though, and probably wasn’t sharing all the details with the others. I really can’t believe that 8 adults could have had detailed knowledge of what Silsby was doing without any of them slamming on the brakes and saying “Hey wait a minute, there’s no way in he!! we’re going to get away with this!”.
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