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?
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.
Wow. Didn’t see that one coming.
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.
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.
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!”.
agreed.