The killers came under the cover of darkness, stealing across the Artibonite River on an abandoned bridge before marauding through this once-tranquil rural community with automatic rifles and knives.
“[They] were like headless chickens, shooting at anyone they saw,” said Louisseul François, a resident of the Haitian town of Pont-Sondé, who somehow survived the slaughter.
François heard the first shots of the gang invasion at about 3am, leapt from his bed and gathered at the town entrance with members of a local vigilante group called “the coalition”. Despite their attempts to organize, its members soon realized they were outgunned. They fled into the surrounding hills, where bleary-eyed, petrified locals were cowering.
“The gangs shot at anything that moved – even dogs … They came to wipe out the whole area. It was a premeditated massacre,” said François, 41, who lost six friends and relatives in the pre-dawn onslaught.
His voice shaking with emotion, François described the scenes he witnessed later that morning when he returned to the area with police who had pushed back the intruders.
The assailants had forced their way into homes, murdering anyone they could find. At one junction, François saw four corpses near a house that was going up in flames. Further ahead, a school and a health clinic had been torched. On one street alone, 19 bodies were splayed in the dirt. “Men, women and a three-year-old child,” said the father of three.
Those scenes, while horrifying, represented only a fraction of the butchery, with the full death toll only becoming clear almost a week after the attack.
At least 115 people are now believed to have been shot or stabbed to death when gang members swept through Pont-Sondé in apparent retribution for the market town’s refusal to submit to the authority of their group. The victims reportedly included babies and the elderly.
One of those killed was François’s cousin, whose body – the first that he discovered - was found lying in a pool of blood. “His head had been shattered by bullets and his chest sliced open with a machete,” François said after attending three funerals in a single day. “In such a small community, it’s impossible to process all of this.”
Experts have called the 3 October rampage one of Haiti’s worst mass killings in decades, eclipsing the 2018 murder of more than 70 civilians in a Port-au-Prince slum called La Saline.
“Unfortunately, there are many massacres in Haitian history … But [in terms of recent years] this is way up there … It was really off the charts,” said William O’Neill, the UN’s chief expert on human rights in the Caribbean country.
O’Neill, a veteran human rights lawyer who has also worked in Rwanda and South Sudan, said he saw a method in the gang’s “concerted, intentional” extermination of human life in Pont-Sondé.
More than simply being about extinguishing individual lives, he believed the carnage was designed to send a warning to Haiti’s recently installed interim government and the UN-backed international security force trying to restore order after months of chaos. “‘We control this. Don’t mess with us. Stay out …’ That was their message – and they delivered it loud and clear,” O’Neill said.
When the first members of that Kenya-led multinational policing mission landed in Haiti in June – after months of turmoil that toppled the government, paralyzed the capital and claimed hundreds of lives – the country’s new prime minister, Garry Conille, had a message of his own for gang bosses he accused of holding 12 million Haitians hostage. “We ask the bandits to lay down their guns and recognize the authority of the state,” said Conille, a former development worker for the UN agency Unicef.
So far there has been no sign of the criminal group’s heeding Conille’s call. But in recent months, some gangs did appear to temporarily fall back – perhaps seeking to lie low while they took the measure of the foreign force.
While visiting Port-au-Prince last month, security expert Romain Le Cour Grandmaison sensed that the imperfect lull in violence had produced the sensation of “a precarious peace” .
Most of Haiti’s capital remained under gang control and there were still sporadic outbreaks of fighting in and around the city, including a deadly attack on the town of Ganthier in August. But some markets and schools reopened after the arrival of hundreds of Kenyan police. A scintilla of stability had been achieved with the creation of a transitional government tasked with organizing fresh elections required after President Jovenel Moïse’s 2021 assassination.
“You feel like you have people in charge,” said Le Cour Grandmaison, who works for the Geneva-based civil society group Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.
The Pont-Sondé massacre has cast that frail improvement into doubt, exposing how politically connected gangs continue to rule not just much of Haiti’s capital, but also the Artibonite valley, one of its most important agricultural hubs.
“We live in constant fear,” said Myriam Fièvre, the mayor of Saint-Marc, a town near the scene of the killings to which thousands of Pont-Sondé’s displaced residents have fled.
The massacre has been blamed on one of the Artibonite’s most notorious gangs, Gran Grif, which controls an important section of the Route Nationale 1 highway between the capital and Haiti’s second city, Cap-Haïtien.
A 2023 UN report lists the gang’s main criminal activities as “murder, rape, robbery, destruction of property, hijacking of trucks and goods, violence against civilian population [and] kidnapping”. In late September, the UN and US announced sanctions against Gran Grif’s leader, Luckson Elan – AKA General Luckson – and a local politician accused of financing and arming the group’s young foot soldiers.
“Less than a week after that, [Elan] commits one of the most awful massacres in Haiti’s recent history … That’s the magnitude of the massacre,” Le Cour Grandmaison said of the murders in Pont-Sondé. “It shows that there’s a sense of absolute power, impunity and a blatant show of force that the gangs wanted to use at this very specific time.”
Fièvre, of Saint-Marc, said Port-au-Prince residents might have grown accustomed to the sound of explosions and gunfire in recent decades, thanks to a succession of violent upheavals and coups. “But now it’s happening here in Artibonite,” she added. “The people aren’t used to this – they just want to go about their daily lives … It’s as if we no longer live in our own country.”
O’Neill, of the UN, who also visited Port-au-Prince last month, urged the international community to do more to support the underfunded, underequipped and outnumbered multinational security force before Haiti’s gangs were emboldened by its lack of progress and went back on the warpath. So far the mission has received about £65m ($84m) of the estimated £450m ($588m) it needs.
O’Neill likened the mission in its current state to a surgeon trying to perform cardiac surgery on a patient with no anesthesiologist, a broken heart monitor, a collapsing operating table and a tray of rusty instruments. “What do you think your chances of success for that procedure are?” he said.
Two weeks after the massacre, Fièvre said security was gradually returning to Pont-Sondé thanks to the arrival of Haitian and Kenyan police. But she feared gangs would soon try to capture Saint-Marc, which is one of Haiti’s largest towns and about 55 miles (89km) north-west of the capital, and lamented how the Artibonite region had become the scene of “a bloodbath”.
“We need help and we need it fast,” Fièvre said. “When we sleep now, we feel our fate is in God’s hands.”
