The only threat Bazelais Merantus posed to Haiti's powerful gangs was to their own consciences — if they have any.
In a country where savage criminal groups are now the de facto government, friends and family say Bazelais was a daily reminder of the kindness and resilience that they insist mark Haiti's true character.
At age 14, Bazelais lost his left leg and his father in Haiti's apocalyptic 2010 earthquake. He was then sent to live in a Port-au-Prince orphanage because his single mother could not handle his special needs along with those of his other five other siblings.
Still, says his best friend and former orphanage companion Sébastien:
"Bazelais was special. In spite of his lost leg, he always helped me — he always wanted to work hard and help others."
When Bazelais became an adult, those others included disabled kids at the same Port-au-Prince orphanage, from youths with lost limbs like himself to young children with conditions such as cerebral palsy.
Which is why Sébastien, who spoke from Port-au-Prince and asked WLRN not to use his last name to protect his identity, said he was "shocked that anyone would have wanted to kill" Bazelais.
But in late October, one of Haiti's gangs, according to numerous sources WLRN spoke with, did murder Bazelais, in ghastly fashion, in the coastal city of Montrouis.
The alleged homicide made him the most recent of thousands of innocent gang victims, a toll that's spiking now as the mafias push out of Port-au-Prince and deeper into Haiti's interior — and one that's compelling the U.S. and the U.N. to create a more serious multinational police support force this fall to confront Haiti's ever-worsening mobster terror.
"If what's happening now in Haiti doesn't sound the alarm for the international community, I don't know what will," says Haitian-American Pierre Imbert of Aventura, who is a founding director the nonprofit Ayiti Community Trust and hails from the coastal city of Arcahaie, Haiti, south of Montrouis.
"People are being completely dehumanized by the gangs — in life and in death."
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Bazelais, with his mother, had recently moved north up Haiti's western coast to Montrouis, in the Artibonite region. He felt, Sébastien recalls, that the tourist resort town would be safer for disabled persons than Port-au-Prince.
It seemed to make sense: As Haiti's government has collapsed in recent years — it is made up now of only a nine-member transitional presidential council that is trying to arrange new elections — 90% of the capital has, in fact, come under the control of the heavily armed gangs.
Last month the U.S. accused one of the members of Haiti's governing council, Fritz Alphonse Jean, of giving support to Port-au-Prince gangs — which the capital's political and business elite often employ as street enforcers. (Jean, whose U.S. visa has now been revoked, denies the charge.)
"I played dominos with Bazelais on his last night with us in Port-au-Price," says Sébastien. "He believed he would have a better future in Montrouis.
"I was sad to see him go, because he made us feel positive even though we have the gangs all around us here."
"If what's happening in Haiti now doesn't sound the alarm I don't know what will. People are being completely dehumanized — in life and in death."Pierre Imbert
But Bazelais' hopes were frighteningly dashed in the last week of October, when a gang known as the Taliban laid siege to Montrouis and took it over in a matter of days.
Jean, a friend of Bazelais' there, told WLRN Bazelais was particularly concerned about the Taliban takeover because that area has several Christian missionary-run orphanages — and the gangs often forcibly recruit youths from them. (Human rights groups estimate half the gangs' members today are minors.)
"So he felt it was really urgent that people outside Montrouis know the gangs were coming there," said Jean, whose last name WLRN is not using to protect his identity as well.
Burning body
On Oct. 27, a shocked Bazelais ambled into the street on his crutch to watch Taliban members maraud by. He took out his phone and called his younger brother, who lives in Pennsylvania, to tell him what was happening.
Unwisely, though, Bazelais also began photographing and video-recording the gang brutality in front of him.
The brother, whose name WLRN is not using to protect his identity, recalls that Bazelais "was talking with me on the phone about the gang and ... When I talk about it, it still makes me cry, man."
That's because the brother says he heard the gang members take Bazelais' phone and shoot him.
Jean and other friends told WLRN that as Bazelais lay dead in the street, the gangsters burned his body.
WLRN could not independently confirm that — largely because there is no real official police or judicial presence in Montrouis now to consult.
But it fits a pattern of the Haitian gangs' cruelty as they seize provincial communities like Montrouis.
Last week, according to the Haitian newspaper Le Nouvelliste, four residents of the town of Petite-Rivière, northwest of Montrouis in Artibonite, were brutally murdered, and more than 40 houses were burned to the ground, when a gang known as Gran Grif attacked it.
That barbarity is also a trademark of the Taliban, which is part of the Haitian gang confederation known as Viv Ansanm, or Live Together in Haitian Creole. Two years ago the Taliban massacred more than 20 Haitians who were marching to protest gang violence in Canaan, north of Port-au-Prince.
In the end, says Bazelais' brother, "because of them I lost my brother.
"He was a good person, bro. He was kind."
It's hardly likely the gang members who allegedly murdered Bazelais in cold blood would have cared much about his kindness or his disability.
Last year, the U.N. says Haiti's gangs were responsible for more than 5,600 killings — and they're on pace to kill more than 6,000 this year. In this decade they've turned more than 1 million Haitians into displaced refugees.
They continue to kidnap Haitians for ransom and hijack necessary goods like food, water, fuel and medicine.
In 2024 Haitian gang members raped more than 4,000 women and girls, killing many of them, according to the international nonprofit Human Rights Watch.
READ MORE: Haitian police arrest a former senator accused of working with gangs to attack a peaceful community
A new U.N. report lays out how vast and horrific the gangs' penetration into Haiti's provinces has become this year.
"Everywhere in Haiti is dangerous now," says Jean. "If they see you coming outside when they tell you to stay in our house, they kill you."
Jean barely escaped Montrouis the day Bazelais was killed, but only after he says gang members pistol-whipped his face for just that: coming outside — he needed to arrange a truck ride for him and his family out of the city — when they ordered residents to stay inside.
“Keep praying for Haiti," Jean said, "because Haiti needs change. Send in more soldiers or something, and then, you know, make Haiti clean again.”
"Even with the one leg, he was the future of Haiti. He wanted to create a life without the gangs telling him what he could do. That was not possible, on this earth.”Tracy Gregorowicz
Soldiers are not coming to wash Haiti of the gang plague. But Haiti experts say the larger multinational police body the U.S. and the U.N. are pushing for there — called the Gang Suppression Force — is imperative now that the gangs are taking strategic towns in the interior.
Imbert notes Montrouis, for example, matters both logistically and economically as a city on the Côte des Arcadins — the upper west Haitian coast.
Sites there, like Montrouis, are flush with seaside tourism investment, and holding him can also help the gangs control traffic between Port-au-Prince Bay and Artibonite, the department known as Haiti's provincial breadbasket.
“If they’re able to control things there, then they could asphyxiate the entire region above Port-au-Prince," Imbert said.
Many who fled Montrouis amid the Taliban's conquest in October went to Haiti's north coast, to cities like Cap Haïtien (also known as Okap) that have not yet fallen to the gangs.
Tracy Gregorowicz of New York, who aids the Port-au-Prince orphanage where Bazelais once lived, says she had hoped he would be part of that Montrouis exodus when he texted her about the Taliban incursion.
"He told me he was going to take refuge in the mountains to the east of Montrouis," Gregorowicz told WLRN. "I wish he would have, I wish he would have gotten to Okap. Especially him."
“Bazelais was a very caring and confident young man," Gregorowicz added.
"Take his phone, but you don’t have to kill him and then set his body on fire in the street. Even with the one leg, he was the future of Haiti. He wanted to create a life without the gangs telling him what he could do.
"That was not possible, on this earth.”
One hope is that someday soon it will in fact be possible for the unborn child friends say Bazelais' pregnant partner is expected to give birth to in April.
