Haiti Rescue Debacle: "Rickety Plans .... Sloppy Do-goodism"

Haiti has charged 10 US missionaries with child abduction and criminal conspiracy for allegedly trying to smuggle 33 children out of the country.

Haitian officials said their cases would now be sent to an investigating judge who would decide how to proceed.

If convicted they face lengthy jail terms, says the BBC’s Paul Adams, in Haiti’s quake-hit capital city.

The group’s lawyer, Edwin Coq, who attended Thursday’s hearing, said the church members face three to nine years in prison if they are found guilty at trial. Under Haiti’s legal system, there won’t be an open trial, but a judge will consider the evidence and could render a verdict in about three months, he said.

“We’re not 100 percent sure if they will find them guilty. I don’t think they will, I don’t think there will be a charge,” Coq said.

Earlier, Coq said that nine of his 10 clients were “completely innocent,” but added that “if the judiciary were to keep one, it could be the leader of the group.” He appeared to be referring to Silsby, who helped organize the mission to Haiti and has spoken for the Americans since they were detained last Friday.

Neighbors of the Silsby family said they abruptly moved out of their house in nearby Meridian, Idaho, shortly before last Christmas, as it was being foreclosed on. The family had appeared prosperous, they said. “It was a big shock” to learn in recent days that Ms. Silsby was being detained in Haiti, said next-door neighbor Chris Wentzel.

The broker handling the foreclosure sale, John Browning, a broker with First Service Group Real Estate, said Ms. Silsby was listed as the home’s owner and that when he discussed the foreclosure with her, “She said, ‘I’m going to be moving.’ “

[Haitian authorities] want to prove they’re still in power, still in charge,” said Sainvil, who often travels to Haiti as a Christian missionary. “If they had asked two simple questions everything would be solved.”

The Americans were arrested on their return trip across the border. Sainvil stayed behind in Haiti after trying unsuccessfully to secure official permission to relocate the children. Both Sainvil and group leader Laura Silsby acknowledged the youths were taken without official permission.

“These kids needed help immediately,” Sainvil told the AJC. “It was the right moment and the right time. I thought they’d make it because many Haitians have good hearts. But I was worried.”

For Ms. Silsby it was the latest in a series of wrong turns on a road she and people who know her in Idaho say was paved with the best of intentions. Yet in her long-stated desire to help orphans, she has left a trail of business and personal debts, as well as unheeded warnings about the intricacies of taking children out of Haiti.

“Laura was the only one who had knowledge of what was going on,” Mr. Coq said. “The rest said only that they love Haiti. That is why they came to Haiti.”

For at least the past two years, Ms. Silsby, the head of an online personal-shopping service, tried to build group homes near Boise, Idaho, where she lives, and in the Dominican Republic, where she hoped to place homeless children from Haiti. But the Idaho plans were apparently stymied by Ms. Silsby’s financial difficulties, which included foreclosure on her house and lawsuits by creditors.

A picture is emerging of a woman on a longstanding drive to help orphaned children but who repeatedly ran into problems with legal authorities as she tried to put her plans into action. But much about Ms. Silsby remains a mystery: the current state of her business and personal finances, the fate of her apparent plans to build a children’s home in Idaho, what ultimately motivated her to plunge into working with orphans abroad, and whether she believed she was following Haitian law as she gathered children in Port-au-Prince.

Ms. Silsby’s interest in the plight of Haitian children appears to have started with her father, who lives near Twin Falls, Idaho. He installs dentures, and over the years, he traveled to Haiti, encountering the extent of the orphan problem there, said Mel Coulter, father of Charisa Coulter, another of the detained Americans who is Ms. Silsby’s 24-year-old live-in nanny. It was through her father that Ms. Silsby became aware and concerned about the issue, Mr. Coulter said. At Ms. Silsby’s parents’ home, her mother said the family had been through too much to comment.

Ms. Silsby had equally grand ambitions closer to home. The Idaho plan called for a “multi-million-dollar complex” for runaway children on a 40-acre lot in Kuna County, Idaho, according to Eric Evans, owner of Eric Evans Construction in Meridian. Ms Silsby said it would have an indoor swimming pool, tennis courts and dormitories for the children, said Mr. Evans, adding that she had discussed having him build the project.

Ms. Silsby had purchased a two-story house in Meridian, where a neighbor said she was known for her blue Lexus convertible and her dog, Bentley.

As her ambitions grew, her financial difficulties mounted. Idaho court records show several judgments against Ms. Silsby in 2009. Activity in the offices of Ms. Silsby’s business, Personal Shopper Inc., visibly slowed, said Scotty Bates, a manager at SpeedyQuick Networks Inc., an Internet service provider whose office is in the same building as Personal Shopper. On Thursday, Personal Shopper’s offices were locked and dark.

Personal Shopper, whose Web site personalshopper.com, promises to guide shoppers to products that fit their needs, won Ms. Silby a 2006 award as International Businesswoman of the Year from eWomen Network, a Texas-based international businesswomen’s group. By last year it also was facing suits.

One suit, filed in federal court in Miami, alleged that Personal Shopper owed more than $320,000 to Florida-based TSG Media Inc. The suit was settled in November 2008, according to an attorney for TSG, David Filler. He declined to disclose the terms of the settlement, but he said that Personal Shopper failed to make good on the settlement.

But attorney Edwin Coq said the group’s leader, Laura Silsby of Boise, knew what she was doing was wrong.

“I’m going to do everything I can to get the nine out. They were naive. They had no idea what was going on, and they did not know that they needed official papers to cross the border,” Coq said. “But Silsby did.”

A longtime Idaho businesswoman, Silsby founded PersonalShopper.com, an Internet gift-shopping service site, in 1999. As its CEO, she was named businesswoman of the year in 2006 by eWomenNetwork, which lauded her for founding a company “based on a conviction that busy working mothers, like herself, needed a time-saving personal shopping service that would help simplify their hectic lives.”

The Idaho Department of Labor confirmed that 14 claims for nonpayment of wages were filed against Personal Shopper Inc. in 2008 and 2009. The company’s former marketing director also filed a civil lawsuit against Silsby and the company in October for unpaid wages, wrongful termination and fraud, the newspaper said.

Silsby is due in Idaho court next week in the case and a jury trial is scheduled for Feb. 22.

Court records show that Silsby also is due in court in March to answer to another civil lawsuit filed by Beer & Cain, a Boise law firm. The lawsuit says Silsby has failed to pay more than $4,500 for services rendered.