The FBI case agent assigned to the assassination of Haiti’s president, Jovenel Moïse, testified Monday in Miami federal court that he never dusted for fingerprints or swabbed for DNA at the crime scene more than four years ago.
“We did the best we could while we were at the residence, but timing was a factor,” FBI special agent Martin Suarez said.
Suarez, who first took the stand on Friday after being called by the government in the trial of four South Florida men accused of conspiring to kill Moïse, said that when he and his team of investigators arrived at the house where the president was killed, they could see bullet holes in the walls and windows throughout the residence and “pools of blood” off the right side of the bed where Moïse had slept. He also identified droplets of blood that were possibly from Martine Moïse, the president’s widow, who was wounded during the attack.
But none of the blood was taken for analysis, he testified. Nor were more than 40 items the FBI collected as evidence, even after Haitian police said they had already gone through the scene. It was seized by the Haitian police, he said.
“Once that evidence was sealed, it was taken from us, and that was the end of the search,” Suarez said. The items included spent bullet casings, ammunition boxes, cell phones and radios and a flash bang device.
The FBI’s investigation into Moïse’s assassination — and the Haitian police’s handling of the crime scene — has emerged as a central focus of the trial as it enters its second week. On Friday, the government focused on showing the damage done to the house during what Martine Moïse testified was 45 minutes of gunfire. On Monday, during cross-examination, defense lawyers focused on the missing forensics, and the lack of a search in what Suarez described as “a big, big house” with several rooms.
Standing trial in Miami are Arcángel Pretel Ortiz, 53, a former FBI informant, Colombian national and U.S. permanent resident; Antonio Intriago, 62, the Venezuelan-American owner of a Doral security company that hired Pretel; James Solages, 40, a Haitian-American handyman who also worked for Intriago, and Walter Veintemilla, 57, an Ecuadorian American that prosecutors say helped finance the plan targeting Moïse.
They’re accused of hiring a squad of Colombian commandos to kill the president so that they could obtain Haitian government contracts from his successor. But their defense lawyers argue the Colombian team was only providing support to arrest Moïse, and that presidential security guards and national police officers had killed him before the Colombians showed up at his home.
All four defendants have been in custody in the Miami federal detention center since their arrests. A fifth defendant, Christian Emmanuel Sanon, a Haiti-born doctor who prosecutors say wanted to replace Moïse as president, will be tried at a later date due to health issues.
Delayed autopsy
Moïse sustained about a dozen gunshot wounds when he was killed on July 7, 2021, inside his bedroom in the hills above Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s chief forensic expert testified last week. But the autopsy was not performed until three days later, and even the country’s top pathologist could not say where the president’s body had been kept during that time.
Suarez testified that he also did not know where the president’s bullet-riddled body had been kept before his July 23 burial, and acknowledged that neither he nor members of his team had examined the body themselves.
The first of several federal agents the government plans to put on the stand to testify about the conspiracy to kill Haiti’s president, the 10-year FBI veteran, who also spent time in the U.S. military, spearheaded the first team of agents deployed to Haiti after the killing.
He and his team arrived in Port-au-Prince on July 13 and left two weeks later, on July 27. At the time, the country was in the throes of a political struggle over leadership following the killing, with the interim prime minister, Claude Joseph, initially in charge before his replacement, Ariel Henry, took over. Henry had been tapped by Moïse before his killing, but his naming was challenged by a number of organizations.
Suarez said while he and his team had received a formal briefing by Colombian law enforcement agents who arrived in Haiti before the FBI did, they did not seek a formal briefing from Haitian authorities or from other U.S. law enforcement agencies in Haiti, including the Drug Enforcement Administration, which maintains a permanent presence in the country, or Homeland Security Investigations.
Defense lawyers asked him about possible enemies of the president, the political atmosphere at the time and whether suspicions over drug trafficking ties in the assassination were raised. After a long pause, Suarez replied, ”Not that I can recall.”
He also said he could not recall the controversy surrounding Moïse in the months leading up to his death, which included a foiled Feb. 7 coup attempt and anti-government protests. His focus when he got to Haiti, he testified, was following the leads of the Colombian and South Floridians involved.
“You didn’t think to investigate any of President Moise’s enemies while you were down there?” asked Marissel Descalzo, an attorney for Veintemilla. “So then you didn’t investigate his enemies. You just investigated who the Haitians told you to investigate.”
Six-hour search
But it was the FBI’s search of the house, which lasted six hours, that defense lawyers pressed on, asking why there was no fingerprint technician or others with the expertise to conduct more detailed forensic work.
“You fly six people down to Haiti to do a search, and you were there at that place for six hours?” asked defense attorney David Howard, one of Ortiz’s lawyers. “You didn’t have time to do a thorough job like swabbing for blood?”
“We were sitting in the residence for six hours, and we had to leave,” Suarez responded, “We didn’t have time to do it.”
Suarez said he and some members of his team went to the crime scene two days after arriving in Haiti, joined by six security personnel from the State Department. They were joined at the crime scene by a Haitian judge and members of the tactical unit of the Haiti National Police, who cleared out the house room by room as they went about their search.
Suarez testified that agents found bullet casings on a mattress and on the floor, along with three boxes of ammunition and a flash-bang device, which can temporarily disorient people with a loud blast and bright flash. He said he personally found the device in one of the “many rooms” in the house. Asked whether he had reviewed the inventory of evidence collected by Haitian police to determine whether similar devices had been recovered, Suarez said he had not.
He also did not check the back of the house. “You’re aware that the FBI went back down to that residence in 2023 and found a whole bunch of stuff in the back that you thought was unnecessary to go to. You’re aware of that, right?” Howard asked.
Photographs shown to jurors depicted bullet holes in the exterior walls of the residence and inside the bedroom where Moïse was killed. Though the government wanted to show the extent to which the killers went, defense lawyes raised questions about the interior, suggesting it was staged.
‘A hot mess’
“There’s a lot of stuff everywhere,” Descalzo said while pointing to photographs of the bedroom as she referred to the clutter as “a hot mess,” adding, “There’s stuff all over this counter.”
In one bathroom photograph, she noted empty dry-cleaning bags hanging nearby and a bottle of Windex on the sink next to bags, shampoo and lotion.
“Do you know whether the Moïse family was messy,” she asked, “or if somebody did this to the house?”
Suarez replied that he could not say.
“The mess is quite extensive,” he acknowledged, adding that investigators believed the Colombian mercenaries involved were searching looking for something. “But I can’t state the condition of the house before I got there.”
Prosecutors have also introduced letters from the State Department, the Defense Department, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI stating that searches found no record that the defendants had ever been employed by those federal agencies.
They also presented Colombian military service records showing that some of the Colombian suspects had served for more than two decades and had received special forces training.
