“My son grew up in Haiti. It was his whole life,” the victim’s mother, Alicia Lloyd, said in an interview. “All he wanted to do was go back to Haiti and help people.”
After attending the Ozark Bible Institute and College in Missouri — the same Pentecostal college his father attended — Mr. Lloyd III chose to return to Haiti, his parents said.
The younger Mr. Lloyd would tell girls he’d meet: “‘Don’t talk to me if you are not interested in living in Haiti for the rest of your life,’” Mr. Lloyd Jr. said. “He said he loved Haiti, and that was his heart.”
Even as most Americans working in Port-au-Prince were evacuated by the U.S. Embassy in March after a gang assault on the city that shut down the airport, the younger Lloyds chose to stay.
In fact, unlike most schools, which were forced to shutter for months this year during the gang uprising, Missions in Haiti’s school remained open.
The Port-au-Prince airport reopened this week after being closed for months, giving the couple a fresh opportunity to flee. They still stayed.
Mr. Lloyd said he told his son he could fly home for a break on Wednesday after the airport reopened, but he declined the offer.
“He just had a heart for the Haitian people,” he said.
Mr. Montis, the pastor, had been with the organization for 20 years. He left behind a wife and two children, a 6-year-old girl and a 2-year-old boy.
“One of the best guys you will ever meet,” Mr. Lloyd said.
The older Mr. Lloyd said they had frequent dealings with gang leaders, who respected their work.
Despite the scourge of killings in recent months, he said it had been relatively peaceful in the area in the past few weeks. He even fed gang members regularly with bread from the organization’s bakery, he said, adding that it was customary to have to pay them to get through roadblocks.
Gang leaders, he said, told him: “‘We appreciate you helping the people.’
“That’s why we felt safe.”