Father Andre Sylvestre--September 6, 2021

Father Andre (Photo by Maria King Carroll)

The Haitian soup was spicy and tasted great at supper tonight. It was wonderful to be back in Robillard and at the rectory of Notre Dame de la Merci Parish in rural northern Haiti. I was looking forward to beginning work in the morning in the medical clinic located just 30 yards down the dirt road from the church. 

I had arrived in Cap Haitien at 2:30 PM this afternoon and had yet to see Fr. Andre, my long-time friend and pastor of the church. So at supper I asked the assistant priest sitting across from me when Father Andre would arrive. It was 8 PM and dark but I knew that Fr. Andre often had business in Cap and would stay the night if it got too late for safe travel on the roads. The priest acknowledged my question but looked down at the table and said he would tell me after supper. 

This seemed strange.

As I gazed at my soup, I began to consider different scenarios. Was Father kidnapped in Cap Haitien today? Could he be sick? And I wondered how was he going to return to Robillard since he had sent his driver with his truck to pick me up today? Father had no vehicle.

Nothing made total sense. However, I was trying to banish the worst thoughts rushing into my head. Surely Father was ok and would be back. 

Another priest sat down at the table and I could not stop myself from asking him too about Father Andre. I asked him if Father would be coming home tonight. He looked at me and said that something bad happened. 

My heart sank. I just knew it. As I looked back and forth at the faces of the two priests sitting across from me, I thought that they were trying to protect me from bad news for as long as possible.  

The second priest told me that this afternoon Father had been shot multiple times in the chest just outside a bank in Cap Haitien by at least two "bandits" on a motorcycle as they were stealing his valise. After being struck, Father had fallen to the ground and almost immediately another motorcycle with two guys on it pulled up, picked up a bleeding Father Andre, and placed him in the middle position on their bike and sped him 2 kilometers to Justinien Hospital in Cap.

On arrival at Justinien, Father Andre was bleeding heavily and was taken to the Operating Room. 

I asked if Father was dead. But the men at the table offered me nothing. I asked again and followed up quickly by asking if Father still had a heartbeat. The second priest answered quickly that Fr. Andre no longer had a heartbeat. 

And so I said, "Father is dead." And even with this statement of mine, the priests did not directly confirm this but told me that Father had been taken to the morgue. 

Father Andre had been brazenly assassinated in broad daylight in Haiti's second-largest city for everyone to see. And his punk killers got away--as they often do in Haiti. 

Father Andre was the light and the soul of Robillard. He was a completely sincere man as he combined his skills with St. Rose of Lima Parish in Murfreesboro, Tennesee and with Haitian Hearts and staffed a medical clinic with full-time Haitian doctors and nurses, built a maternity center where hundreds of babies are born each year, and he started an orphanage which has 36 kids who knew him as Papa. He made everything good happen here. 

Tonight the parish staff and I sat around staring at our cellphones and cursing the chronically weak Haitian internet as we tried to disseminate this horrible news to family and friends. 

And the Dominican Novellas played on the TV screen in front of us showing the problems of the disinterested rich--a world so far removed from Fr. Andre's world in the parish of the poor. 

John A. Carroll, MD

www.haitianhearts.org