Haiti-Scene
9-26-1994
^At Ransacked Police Station, A Survivor Visits, and Remembers With PM-Haiti, Bjt
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
CAP-HAITIEN, Haiti (AP) _ The last time Raynuld Theodore was inside the suffocating prison cell at police headquarters, he saw a friend beaten to death and was pummeled himself.
Just eight days later, he revisited the five-by-seven-foot cell Sunday as a crowd ransacked the yellow stucco building, no longer fearful of police who tortured and killed their neighbors there.
Police abandoned the building following a shootout with U.S. Marines that killed 10 Haitians Saturday night. American officers said the victims apparently were members of Haitian security forces.
By Sunday afternoon, the police station was picked clean. On the floor were rifled files - traffic violations, fingerprinted identity cards and other papers. Desks and filing cabinets were gone, carted away or smashed apart for firewood.
One boy holding a piece of splintered wood pointed it like a rifle and said, "Bang, bang," to the looters. A man pawed through an inch-deep layer papers in one room, looking for the drivers license that police confiscated from him weeks earlier.
Littering the street outside were cast-off khaki uniforms, cartridge belts and more papers. A cracked green police helmet lay by the front door.
A woman inside the headquarters kicked another helmet across the littered floor. On the yellow wall beside her was a smear of fresh blood, apparently from one of the Haitians hit in the gunbattle.
When Theodore was last in the building, he thought he never would leave alive. On Sunday, in the little holding cell enclosed by concrete walls and a door of metal bars, with a little sunlight filtering in from a row of tiny windows, he approached a reporter, lifted his shirt and showed a purple welt with broken skin.
"They did this to me," he said.
As leader of the political group Committee of Cap Haitien, which backs exiled President Jean-Betrand Aristide, Theodore, 30, was an obvious target for security forces. He went into hiding when Aristide was overthrown in a September 1991 coup.
Tired of living on the run, last December he came back to Cap Haitien, his hometown and the second-biggest city in Haiti. On Sept. 16, Theodore was hauled to police headquarters.
Sharing his cell were four other men, including one he knew from his political work, another Cap Haitien man named Lico Cherie. The next day, a policeman entered the cell and beat Cherie with a piece of thick wood as his cellmates looked on, unable to help.
At 3 p.m., "He just lost consciousness. ... The policeman tried to revive him with water, but he was dead," Theodore said.
The body was removed and taken away by car.
The following day, with Haiti apparently on the brink of a U.S. invasion, police panicked and let Theodore and the others go.
During his return trip Sunday, he took a souvenir from the ransacked building, a bullet from a police rifle.
"I am very happy," Theodore said of the disappearance of Cap Haitien's police. "They won't beat me anymore."
^At Ransacked Police Station, A Survivor Visits, and Remembers With PM-Haiti, Bjt
^By ANDREW SELSKY
^Associated Press Writer
CAP-HAITIEN, Haiti (AP) _ The last time Raynuld Theodore was inside the suffocating prison cell at police headquarters, he saw a friend beaten to death and was pummeled himself.
Just eight days later, he revisited the five-by-seven-foot cell Sunday as a crowd ransacked the yellow stucco building, no longer fearful of police who tortured and killed their neighbors there.
Police abandoned the building following a shootout with U.S. Marines that killed 10 Haitians Saturday night. American officers said the victims apparently were members of Haitian security forces.
By Sunday afternoon, the police station was picked clean. On the floor were rifled files - traffic violations, fingerprinted identity cards and other papers. Desks and filing cabinets were gone, carted away or smashed apart for firewood.
One boy holding a piece of splintered wood pointed it like a rifle and said, "Bang, bang," to the looters. A man pawed through an inch-deep layer papers in one room, looking for the drivers license that police confiscated from him weeks earlier.
Littering the street outside were cast-off khaki uniforms, cartridge belts and more papers. A cracked green police helmet lay by the front door.
A woman inside the headquarters kicked another helmet across the littered floor. On the yellow wall beside her was a smear of fresh blood, apparently from one of the Haitians hit in the gunbattle.
When Theodore was last in the building, he thought he never would leave alive. On Sunday, in the little holding cell enclosed by concrete walls and a door of metal bars, with a little sunlight filtering in from a row of tiny windows, he approached a reporter, lifted his shirt and showed a purple welt with broken skin.
"They did this to me," he said.
As leader of the political group Committee of Cap Haitien, which backs exiled President Jean-Betrand Aristide, Theodore, 30, was an obvious target for security forces. He went into hiding when Aristide was overthrown in a September 1991 coup.
Tired of living on the run, last December he came back to Cap Haitien, his hometown and the second-biggest city in Haiti. On Sept. 16, Theodore was hauled to police headquarters.
Sharing his cell were four other men, including one he knew from his political work, another Cap Haitien man named Lico Cherie. The next day, a policeman entered the cell and beat Cherie with a piece of thick wood as his cellmates looked on, unable to help.
At 3 p.m., "He just lost consciousness. ... The policeman tried to revive him with water, but he was dead," Theodore said.
The body was removed and taken away by car.
The following day, with Haiti apparently on the brink of a U.S. invasion, police panicked and let Theodore and the others go.
During his return trip Sunday, he took a souvenir from the ransacked building, a bullet from a police rifle.
"I am very happy," Theodore said of the disappearance of Cap Haitien's police. "They won't beat me anymore."
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