In mid-March, Jean Dickens Toussaint and his wife, Abigail Toussaint, both 33 years old, traveled from Florida to Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The couple was visiting Jean’s relatives and planned to attend a festival there. To their horror, on March 18, they were kidnapped and held for ransom.

After the abduction, the captors contacted the Toussaints’ family members and demanded $6,000 if the relatives wanted to free their loved ones from Haiti. Not wanting the couple harmed, the relatives obliged, but now, the kidnappers are asking for significantly more. Once the $6,000 was paid for both, the criminals upped the price to $200,000 each, Fox News said yesterday (March 26). “We don’t have that type of money,” Jean’s sister, Nikese Toussaint, told a Miami news station.

The couple’s niece said a family friend went to pick the 33-year-olds up from the airport, but they were kidnapped as well. “They stopped the bus at a stop, and they asked for the Americans on the bus and their escorts to come off the bus, and then they took them,” the woman claimed. The U.S. State Department told Fox News they are actively looking into the matter: “We are aware of reports of two U.S. citizens missing in Haiti. When a U.S. citizen is missing, we work closely with local authorities as they carry out their search efforts, and we share information with families however we can.”

The outlet added that the department asked Americans to avoid traveling to Haiti “due to kidnappings, crime and civil unrest.” As previously reported by REVOLT, in November 2022, the U.S. embassy also issued a travel advisory for “darker-skinned” Americans to use caution when visiting the Dominican Republic because individuals were being mistaken for Haitians and placed in overcrowded detention camps where they were forced to go days without food or water.