Kyle Minor

Francky and Tania Désir

On January 17, 2007, a gang of armed kidnappers broke down Francky and Tania Désir’s front door near the village of Callebasse, Haiti, in the mountains just south of Port-au-Prince. They abducted the Désirs’ 2-year-old daughter Fabby and held her for $200,000 ransom. For 5 days, the Désirs did not know if they would ever again see their daughter alive. Francky Désir negotiated the ransom down to $5,000, borrowed the money from relatives in upstate New York, and delivered the ransom to the kidnappers in Delmas. The next day, his daughter was released on the street nearby. Her clothes had been stolen, and she was severely dehydrated because  she had been given little to eat or drink except moonshine. She was afraid for her life, but she was otherwise unharmed . . .

Read the rest of “A Kidnapping in Haiti,” a new excerpt from my nonfiction manuscript-in-progress, at The Rumpus.