An investigating magistrate was questioning the five men yesterday after interrogating the women a day earlier. A district attorney will determine whether to file charges, officials said.
The Haitian parents said in an interview that they surrendered their children on Jan. 28, two days after a local orphanage worker, acting on behalf of the Baptists, convened nearly the entire village of about 500 people on a dirt soccer pitch to present the Americans’ offer.
The orphanage worker, Issac Adrien, said he told the villagers their children would be educated at a home in the Dominican Republic so that they might eventually return to take care of their families.
Many parents jumped at the offer. The village school had collapsed and their homes were destroyed in Haiti’s Jan. 12 quake. They had no money to feed the children, they said.
“It’s only because the bus was full that more children didn’t go,’’ said Melanie Augustin, a 58-year-old who gave her 10-year-old daughter, Jovin, to the Americans.
Adrien said he brought the Americans to this mountain village where people scrape by growing carrots, peppers, and onions. He said he met their leader, Laura Silsby of Boise, Idaho, at a school in Port-au-Prince two days earlier.
Silsby said she was looking for homeless children, Adrien said, adding that he went that very day to talk to the parents in Callebas.
In a jailhouse interview Saturday, Silsby told the Associated Press that most of the children had been delivered to the Americans by distant relatives, while some came from orphanages that had collapsed in the quake.
The missionaries’ lawyer, Jorge Puello, said yesterday that the Americans “willingly accepted kids they knew were not orphans because the parents said they would starve otherwise.’’
The parents of four children taken by Silsby said the Americans took down contact information for all the families and assured them that a relative would be able to visit them in the Dominican Republic.
