Missing Bahamians Rattle a Nation

Swaying in pleated teal robes that match the waters of the Caribbean, the gospel choir of Zion Baptist Church belts out “In Times Like These” as the Rev. Peter Pinter reaches for the heavens and appeals for answers.

“Lord, we believe you will break this case,” the minister professes as his congregation prays for five local boys who, one by one, have mysteriously vanished in the last six months. “The Lord knows where they are. It’s in his hands.”

Having found no earthly explanation, the deeply spiritual and close-knit people of Grand Bahama Island have taken refuge in their faith and their hymns’ soothing rhythm to cope with disappearances that have confounded authorities, shattered a sense of national well-being and broken the hearts of schoolmates and parents.

Long spared the abject poverty and violence afflicting most Caribbean neighbors, the hard-working hotel maids and trinket traders of this lush vacation land have no experience to draw on to understand what is believed to be the first serial crime to scar their nation. And, in the absence of telling evidence, the frightened people of Freeport have taken to wild and ghoulish speculation.

From fears of occult sacrifice to organ hunting, Bahamians are putting out their own gruesome versions of the fate of the missing boys, with many concluding they were nabbed by predators who stalked the Winn-Dixie supermarket where all five bagged groceries.

“People are saying all kinds of things,” said Buster Laing, a Sunday school teacher at Zion who knew 13-year-old Deangelo McKenzie, the third of the five boys, ages 11 to 14, to disappear since early May. “There were rumors last week that police had seized all the butchers’ tables and equipment from the supermarket and that they’d found body parts. It brought thousands of people into the streets to demand something be done about it. But it was just rumors.”

Police found skeletal remains in the Barbary Beach area last weekend, and murder charges in connection with four of the boys were filed Wednesday against a 35-year-old hardware store clerk who worked near the supermarket. But the remains have yet to be identified as belonging to any of the missing boys, and the possible break does little to shed light on why the boys were killed, if they were in fact murdered.

Although authorities caution Bahamians against letting their imaginations run rampant, the link in the five cases is the supermarket and the nearby video game arcade where the boys hung out -- a venue that one bag boy said was stalked by at least two men who had not been seen since the last boy went missing.

Many are speculating that the boys have been taken off the island.

“No way those boys could be hidden somewhere here. Our people are too much busybodies, always watching what’s going on at the neighbors’. Somebody, for sure, would have seen them,” said Queenie Bishop, a taxi driver who shuttles tourists from the seaside resorts at Lucaya to the craft shops of the International Market. Like many employed in the tourist trade, she contends that such crime is alien to the Bahamas and suspects a foreign hand in the boys’ disappearance.

Horrid Rumors

Two of the missing boys are Haitians, though born in the Bahamas, fueling speculation -- born of brooding resentment of an influx of refugees -- that voodoo practitioners might have snatched them.

Marilyn Davis, Deangelo’s grandmother, says she still holds out hope that the boys have been kidnapped by slave traders for forced labor and, one day, will be found and freed.

But since authorities claimed in mid-October to have exacted confessions about the death of the first boy to disappear, 12-year-old Jake Grant, Davis has quit going to her crafts job at the Straw Market, despondent at the implications for the prospects of her grandson’s safe return.

Comforted by relatives and neighbors at her modest home, Davis has shut out the horrid rumors of voodoo, devil worship or body snatching by traders in black-market lungs and kidneys.

But with police saying that Jake was accidentally killed by his playmates and his body somehow disposed of, Davis acknowledged that she had to ponder the unthinkable. Brenda Roberts, whose 12-year-old son, Stephen Dorval, was among four youths charged in Jake’s disappearance, said police took him in for questioning while she was at work one night in early October and haven’t allowed her to see him since. Regulations prevent her from talking to him by telephone, and she hasn’t been able to come up with the money for airfare to New Providence Island to visit.

According to the scenario police have disclosed only to Jake’s mother, Bridgette, the boys were swimming at the Tivoli Gardens Apartment pool while Roberts was at work -- something Roberts said they wouldn’t do without her permission. Through roughhousing or a fall, Jake was killed or seriously injured, and the boys panicked and got rid of his body.

Roberts says the scenario is nonsense, that police pressured the terrified children into confessions to clear up at least one of the embarrassingly unexplained cases. “Everyone in this apartment complex is puzzled,” Roberts, a cocktail waitress at a seafront bar named Butler’s, said of her neighbors, whose ground-floor units are arrayed around the kidney-shaped pool. “Someone would have had to see or hear something.”

If the police version of Jake’s fate is accurate, it still sheds little light on the disappearance of the other four: Mackinson Colas, 11, sent on an errand by his mother on May 16; Deangelo, who disappeared en route to school May 27; Junior Reme, 11, who was last seen at his home July 29; and Desmond Rolle, 14, who disappeared after leaving the supermarket Sept. 28. Simon Lewis, a government spokesman, said that all are from low-income but loving homes and that there are no suspicions that the boys might have run away.

Deangelo’s grandmother said she suspected that adults were involved in getting rid of Jake’s corpse and that collusion of some sort drew the other missing boys into the path of the body snatchers.

“Knowing Deangelo, he wouldn’t have gone off with someone he didn’t know,” said the 50-year-old grandmother who had raised the boy since he was 6 weeks old. She has kept his tidy bedroom intact in fading hopes that he will one day reclaim it. A yellow Care Bear and smiley-face pillows on his narrow bed, sports shoes lined up in a corner, a Hewlett-Packard personal computer left neat after his last bout of homework testify to the 13-year-old’s passage from childhood into adolescence.

Pinter, the Zion pastor, transformed a vestibule of his church into a command center for volunteer searches for the first boys to disappear. He insists that hope will never die before convincing evidence surfaces that the boys are no longer living but says he suspects Jake’s accidental death somehow put the other boys in touch with whoever caused their disappearance.

“If they’re alive, I don’t think they are still on the island,” said the pastor, gesturing to a pile of fliers with the missing boys’ pictures and an offer of $75,000 for information on their disappearance.

‘A Little Bit Afraid’

Desmond, the latest boy to disappear, left the supermarket in Freeport’s faceless downtown center on foot shortly after 9 p.m., headed for his home five miles away in Williams Town. Another box boy, Donaldo Wallace, was probably the last person to see him.

As he bagged groceries on a busy Saturday, Donaldo said he is “a little bit afraid” walking in the footsteps of friends and schoolmates who have gone missing. He is especially haunted by the memory of suggesting to Desmond on the night of his disappearance that the two share a taxi to get home as darkness descended.

“He said he wanted to walk,” said the stout, soft-spoken Donaldo, who says bagging groceries and helping customers to their cars can earn him about $45 a day in tips, which he uses to play video games, pay for school lunches and help out his family. “I don’t know why, because it’s a long way out to his place.”

Donaldo says he has no idea what happened to his friends but says Desmond, whom he knew better than the other four, “had a habit of gambling.” He also remembers a pair of adult men who had been hanging out at the supermarket and the nearby arcade until the last disappearance.

“They used to socialize and loiter,” Wallace said of the men he describes as about 20 and 25. Asked if he could identify them if he saw them again, he replied readily: “Yes, ma’am.”

Police have disclosed little about the suspect charged with the murders of Deangelo, Mackinson, Junior, Desmond and a 22-year-old victim identified as Jamaal Robinson. A court document said only that Cordell Farrington worked at the Kelly’s Freeport Ltd. Hardware store near the Winn-Dixie.

Elce Lauriston, a 16-year-old who stocks shelves at the store, exuded disinterested bravado when asked what he thought happened to the boys.

“I haven’t really thought about it,” he said with a shrug, pretending to read a sports magazine as he answered questions. But he says he believes that the five cases are linked by the boys’ regular presence at the store and the video arcade, and that whoever grabbed the boys stalked them at those locations.

“Everyone is being more alert. We know now to keep our children closer,” said Tiffany Smith, a 25-year-old hotel worker out shopping with her 8-year-old son, Duran. “It’s hard to believe anything like this could be happening here. A serial killer? No way. The Bahamas is a nice place to live, and safe -- at least we’ve always thought so.”