27067: Hermantin(News)Abduction: Two mothers' living nightmare (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

Posted on Tue, Jan. 03, 2006

Miami Herald

HAITI

Abduction: Two mothers' living nightmare

Last week, two kidnapped Americans and their families struggled to pool ransom 
money, navigate heated negotiations and somehow maintain hope.

BY CARA BUCKLEY
cbuckley@MiamiHerald.com

This has to be a joke, she thought. A sick joke, sure, but a joke nonetheless.
It was two days before New Year's Eve and Leigh Somerville McMillan was 
standing in her home in Winston-Salem, N.C., listening to her 30-year old son's 
voice message, crackling from a distant phone in a fearsome land 1,280 miles 
away.
''I've been kidnapped,'' her son, Frank Eaton, a documentary filmmaker, said.
''It was too horrible to believe,'' McMillan, a freelance writer, recalled. But 
by the end of Eaton's somber message, she realized it was no joke. Her son had 
been snatched from the streets of Port-au-Prince with a friend. Trying to 
swallow back panic, MacMillan dialed the number he had left.
Abductions like the ones last Wednesday of Eaton and his friend, Alain 
Maximilien, 33, a DJ born in the U.S. and raised in Haiti who goes by the name 
the ''Haitian Hillbilly,'' have become so routine in Haiti that a day doesn't 
go by without 10 people disappearing from its streets.

UNSEEN VICTIMS

But for parents and friends of kidnapping victims, and indeed the victims 
themselves, the entire ordeal is at once terrifyingly personal and deeply 
surreal.
If your loved one happens to be a U.S. citizen, you'll find yourself dealing 
with U.S. Embassy officials and the FBI. If you're not wealthy, you might have 
to drain your savings, accept donations from co-workers and max out credit 
cards, just like Alain's mother, Chris, did, to try to get the ransom money 
together in time.
''I think any stress, a parent can go through it,'' said Chris Maximilien from 
her Kendall home Monday, a day after her son's release. ``But when it comes to 
your child's life, there's no comparison. It's your worst fear.''
Gunmen surrounded Maximilien and Eaton's car around 8 p.m. Wednesday, after the 
pair left a favorite bar, and drove them to a shanty in the violent 
Port-au-Prince slum of Cité Soleil. The captives were shoved into a 
10-by-10-foot room that immediately filled with a dozen armed men, who shouted 
taunts, smoked plenty of joints and drew their fingers across their necks. 
Heady with glee and stoned, some of the kidnappers drifted to sleep, and others 
arrived to keep guard.
Curiously, Maximilien was allowed virtually unfettered access to his cell 
phone. He called his father, Leslie Maximilien, who he lives with in 
Port-au-Prince. Then he called his friends back at the bar. Though rampant 
kidnappings have long gripped Port-au-Prince, Maximilien's friends were 
terrified that they too were targets. Some of them spent the night in the bar.

Chris Maximilien was at work Wednesday night, as an emergency room nurse in 
Jackson South Community Hospital, when her youngest son called with the news 
about Alain.
She would not sleep for the next four nights, or stop smoking Benson and Hedges 
mentholated cigarettes, or wander more than a few feet from the phone.

In Winston-Salem, after hearing her son's message Thursday morning, Leigh 
McMillan tried to call Leslie Maximilien, Alain's father and Chris' ex-husband, 
but couldn't get through. Her younger son called the FBI. An agent soon showed 
up at McMillan's door to help with negotiations.
In Port-au-Prince, Leslie Maximilien contacted a negotiator recommended by 
friends to get his son back. The abductors first demanded $2 million, but by 
Thursday night agreed on $20,000. Family members and friends pooled their 
savings. The negotiator set off into the night with the money, in cash, and 
disappeared. No trace of him, or the money, has surfaced yet.

In the shanty in Cité Soleil, Maximilien, who is fluent in Creole, tried to 
charm the kidnappers while Eaton, whose grip on Creole is shaky at best, mostly 
sat silent. Sometimes the kidnappers pointed empty pistols at the men, and 
pretended to shoot. They told Maximilien they might kill Eaton to prove how 
serious they were. Maximilien didn't tell Eaton what they'd said.

Friday dawned. A Miami Herald article about the abductions drew Maximilien's 
old friends out of the woodwork, people from his old Boca Raton boarding 
school, and they all called his mother en masse. At Mac's Club Deuce, a gritty 
bar in South Beach, Maximilien's old drinking buddies raised a toast in his 
name. In Winston-Salem, the McMillan household bulged with stricken family 
members and friends.
Leslie Maximilien found another negotiator. The man arrived in Cité Soleil with 
the $9,000 demanded by the kidnappers, but the person he handed it over to 
stole the loot. Maximilien and Eaton believed it would be their last night in 
captivity, and so did their kidnappers. They brought the hostages Haitian 
cigarettes, bottled water and seven beers, and spent the evening casually 
chatting and teaching Eaton Creole phrases like ''si Dieu vlé,'' or ``if God 
wills.''

DOUBLE-CROSSED

Saturday. Leslie Maximilien found a third negotiator who arrived in Cité Soleil 
with $10,000, as demanded. But the kidnappers, perhaps believing they could 
squeeze out more for Maximilien, only released Eaton, who was whisked out of 
Cité Soleil.
Chris Maximilien phoned Leigh McMillan to tell her how glad she was for her, 
but then any hope she had left for Alain evaporated. Then Alain called, lifting 
her spirits. Her other children were with her. New Year's Eve passed in 
silence.
Meanwhile, in Cité Soleil, a gang leader told Maximilien he would celebrate New 
Year's Eve with him by picking up girls, but ended up getting too drunk to go 
out. Maximilien also found out that one of the kidnappers had gone out 
joyriding and totaled his car.
Sunday. After learning -- erroneously, as it turned out -- that the kidnappers 
wanted another $10,000, Chris Maximilien frantically reached out to her family 
in Pittsburgh, her friends and her co-workers at Jackson South to cobble 
together enough.
But it was New Year's Day, and nearly every wire transfer office was closed. 
She and her stepdaughter, Joanne, found an open Publix in Doral, but its 
Western Union office didn't have $10,00 to send. A Western Union office at a 
Hialeah Publix could handle the transfer. But it was also New Year's Day in 
Haiti. Everything was closed. There was nowhere to wire the money to.
In Port-au-Prince, Leslie Maximilien again tapped friends and family for help. 
As it turned out, the kidnappers wanted another $3,400. The negotiator went to 
Cité Soleil with the cash and, as demanded, a radio and ten pairs of running 
shoes. A fourth negotiator handled the final release.
As evening fell, Maximilien was lead from the shanty on foot. United Nation 
forces were exchanging machine gunfire with other armed men, uninvolved in his 
kidnapping, so the going was treacherous.
Finally, he was ferried by a motorcycle taxi to the edge of Cité Soleil. A 
driver from his house met him, and took him home.
''It didn't really hit me until I was home in my own bathroom,'' said 
Maximilien. ``I didn't believe it until I saw myself in the mirror.''
Chris Maximilien shook when she got the news. Eaton, flooded with relief, 
congratulated Alain by phone, then arranged his own trip back to North 
Carolina. He was slated to arrive there Monday night but, to his family's deep 
dismay, wants to go back to Haiti in February.
Alain Maximilien doesn't plan to leave Port-au-Prince. Instead, he plans to 
return to his radio show and spread the word about the conditions in Cité 
Soleil. He's even been in touch already with one of the kidnappers, because 
he's trying to get back his laptop, which was in the car.
A friend of his, Ashley Swanson, designed two T-shirts to memorialize the 
ordeal. ''Got ransom?'' reads one, while the other reads, ''My friend got 
kidnapped and all he got me was this lousy T-shirt.'' Their printing is already 
in the works.