28061: Hermantin(News)Killing was political, daughter fears (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

Lhermantin@hotmail.com


Killing was political, daughter fears


Slain father was guard at embassy for U.S. in Haiti



By Alva James-Johnson
South Florida Sun-Sentinel

March 3, 2006



Shirley Polo spoke to her father at 8:20 p.m. Wednesday via a telephone call 
from Haiti.

When she woke in Lake Worth the next morning, she learned that her father was 
dead.

Ernest Polo was one of two security guards with the U.S. Embassy in Haiti 
gunned down in a Port-au-Prince neighborhood, according to Polo and her family.

Polo, 24, said she fled to Lake Worth in July because of her affiliation with a 
political party called Mobilization for Progress in Haiti, whose leader 
unsuccessfully campaigned for the presidency. In recent months, Polo said, 
opponents of the party have threatened her.

She said her mother, Polene Tergene Polo, 47, and her sister, Tagie, 18, joined 
her in January, leaving her father and four other siblings behind.

Shirley Polo said they all feared for their lives because of her political 
ties, and she thinks members of Lavalas, the political party of former 
President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, killed her father.

Aristide was ousted from the country in a bloody rebellion two years ago. While 
he remains exiled in South Africa, his former protégé René Préval is the newly 
elected president of Haiti.

"I feel like everything is on my shoulders," she said through a translator 
Thursday. "It's because of me my father died."

Officials at the U.S. State Department could not be reached Thursday to confirm 
the murders. But a leader of Mobilization for Progress and a member of a 
Lavalas organization in Miami both discounted Polo's claims.

Samir Mourra, a former Miami businessman who heads Mobilization for Progress in 
Haiti and was a staunch opponent of Aristide, said Thursday he doesn't think 
Polo's affiliation with his organization has anything to do with the shootings.

"I don't see why they would target them because of my party," said the former 
presidential candidate now living in Haiti. "We haven't received any 
retaliation whatsoever. Many of the people who are with Préval were with me. 
Our party has a lot of Lavalas members in it."

Lavarice Gaudin, chairman of Veye Yo, a Lavalas organization in Miami, said he 
wouldn't be surprised if some people orchestrate crimes in the country to 
undermine the Préval government.

"Soon you'll see many killings going on just to put the blame on Lavalas," he 
said.

The latest murders unsettled Haitians in South Florida, where Haitian radio 
stations, including Radio Mega 1020 AM in North Miami Beach, broadcast reports 
of the incident.

Alex Saint Surin, the station's general manager, said correspondents from Haiti 
reported that the bodies of two U.S. Embassy security guards had been found in 
Port-au-Prince Wednesday night.

Shirley Polo's cousin, Firmann Dorvilus of Lake Worth, said one of Polo's 
sisters in Haiti told them that someone had found Ernest Polo's body on the 
ground, stripped of his cell phone and jewelry.

Polo said her father, who worked with the U.S. Embassy for eight years, was on 
his way home from the U.S. ambassador's house with the other security guard 
when the shooting occurred. She said her father was stopped on the road, and 
shot in the neck, heart and stomach.

Alva James-Johnson can be reached at ajjohnson@sun-sentinel.com or 
954-356-4523.


Copyright © 2006, South Florida Sun-Sentinel