Daughter, son-in-law of Missouri state representative killed in Haiti (2024)

JEFFERSON CITY — The daughter and son-in-law of a Missouri state lawmaker were among three missionaries killed after being attacked by gangs Thursday evening in Haiti’s capital city.

Missions in Haiti Inc., a Claremore, Oklahoma-based missionary group, announced the deaths in a Facebook post early Friday.

It said the victims were David ‘Davy’ Lloyd III, 23, a son of the group’s founders; Lloyd’s wife, Natalie Lloyd, 21; and Jude Montis, 45, the group’s Haitian director.

Natalie Lloyd is the daughter of state Rep. Ben Baker, a Neosho Republican.

“My heart is broken in a thousand pieces. I’ve never felt this kind of pain,” Baker said early Friday on social media. “They went to Heaven together. Please pray for my family we desperately need strength. And please pray for the Lloyd family as well. I have no other words for now.”

A Facebook posting on the Missions in Haiti page late Thursday stated that Davy and Natalie, along with children, were leaving a church when “they were ambushed by a gang of 3 trucks full of guys.”

The posting said Davy Lloyd was taken to a house, where he was tied up and beaten. The post later said that Davy, Natalie and a third person, listed only as Jude, were at the house when shooting broke out. It said that gang members “shot all the windows out of the house and continue to shoot. Their lives are in danger.”

Three hours later, after midnight, another posting from Missions in Haiti read: “Davy and Natalie and Jude were shot and killed by the gang about 9 o’clock this evening. We all are devastated.”

Mission in Haiti’s website says David and Alicia Lloyd began the nonprofit in 2000, hoping to set the troubled Caribbean nation on a different course.

“We aim to accomplish this by targeting the country’s biggest need — its children,” the website says. “Although the entire nation is steeped in poverty, the children suffer the worst. Thousands are malnourished, uneducated, and headed for hopeless lives apart from Christ.”

A May 2023 newsletter posted on the mission website said Natalie “has been helping with the kids at the House of Compassion and assisting in our ACE school. Davy has been working on a lot of badly needed projects around our compound,” including building a laundry room and repairing bathrooms.

Hannah Cornett, Davy Lloyd’s sister, told the Associated Press that her brother and sister-in-law were going to celebrate their two-year anniversary in June and his birthday in early July.

Cornett said her parents are full-time missionaries in Haiti, and that she and her two brothers grew up there.

“Davy spoke Creole before he spoke English. It was home,” she said in a phone interview. “Haiti was all we knew.”

Cornett, 22, said her parents run an orphanage, school and church in Haiti, and that she and her brothers grew up with the orphans: “It was just one big happy family there.”

She said her older brother was outgoing, had built a garden and raised a lot of animals. While he went back to the U.S. for Bible college and then got married, he returned to Haiti with Natalie Lloyd to do more humanitarian work.

“They just had a lot of love for Haiti, and they just wanted to help the people there,” Cornett said. “That’s their calling.”

Cornett noted that Montis worked for her parents for 20 years and left behind two children, ages 2 and 6.

Alicia Lloyd, mother of Davy Lloyd, told the Oklahoma-based Claremore Daily Progress newspaper that her son “was one of these people who could do anything.”

“I hope something good can come out of this. We don’t see it now, but we don’t want (their lives) to be in vain,” she was quoted as saying.

The slayings occurred as the capital crumbles under the relentless assault of violent gangs that control 80% of Port-au-Prince while authorities await the arrival of a police force from Kenya as part of a U.N.-backed deployment aimed at quelling gang violence in the troubled Caribbean country.

A Haitian police union official told the Associated Press the attack occurred in Lizon, in northern Port-au-Prince. It wasn’t immediately clear which gang or gangs were responsible for the fatal shootings.

However, a gang leader called Chyen Mechan, which means “mean dog” in Haitian Creole, controls the area where the shooting occurred. His real name is Claudy Célestin, and he is a dismissed civil servant from Haiti’s Ministry of the Interior.

The leader of another gang known as General Jeff also controls territory near the neighborhood where the couple was killed. Both gangs are part of a coalition known as Viv Ansanm, which means “Live Together.”

Baker, according to his Missouri House biography, is a lay minister and former Neosho mayor who has embarked on mission trips to India, Africa and Central America.

Political leaders and others across Missouri and the U.S. expressed their sympathies Friday to Baker and his family.

Gov. Mike Parson, a Republican, called the news “absolutely heartbreaking.”