GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) -- It was a mystery: A 40-foot shipping container full of relief supplies left a loading dock in Grand Rapids in December 2013. Nearly two years later, it still hasn't arrived in Haiti.
Seventeen charities had critical items on board.
Jim Townsend was with a group from Holy Trinity Parish in Comstock Park when they visited a partner clinic in Haiti. A doctor with their group looked at a rusty birthing bed and said "a woman would be crazy to give birth on that. She'd be likely to get tetanus," according to Townsend. So they got a new birthing bed to ship to Haiti.
His group, along with 16 other organizations, they gave their stuff to Rays of Hope International, a well-known Grand Rapids charity that helps other organizations ship supplies around the world. A truck picked up the shipping container from the Rays of Hope dock in December of 2013 and took it to Miami for sea shipment to Haiti.
Then it seemed to disappear.
"We would be given a date," said Valerie Mossman-Celestin of the West Michigan-based Haitian Artisans for Peace International (HAPI). "Then we would hear nothing and nothing would arrive" at their mission in Haiti. There were medical supplies and electrical equipment in their shipment.
WHERE WAS THE SHIPMENT?
Six months passed. A year. A year and a half.
Finally, on Sept. 1, 2015, Rays of Hope executive Kim Sorrell emailed the charities with a bombshell revelation. The container, she wrote, "may have been stolen" and the charities may have been swindled.
Rays of Hope ships a lot of containers across the globe, but this case was the first time it had used a new company called Synergy Forwarding, which had been created in Florida just three months earlier.
Corporation records list a Haitian man named Moise Garcon as the managing member of the company. Sorrell said he is the man Rays of Hope dealt with most often regarding the container. Garcon seems to have solid credentials as a businessman and former employee of the Haitian Consulate in Atlanta. He lists a post with UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) on his resume. He's involved in Haitian charity and politics and has a radio show in Haiti. He is believed to be in Haiti, where Target 8 tried unsuccessfully to contact him.
The 17 charities gave Rays of Hope $20,000 to move their goods. Rays of Hope paid Synergy Forwarding. It took the money and went out of business, leaving everyone wondering: Where was the shipment?
Late this summer, Rays of Hope connected with the Haitian vice-consul in Chicago, Evence Jean-Louis. He was investigating Synergy Forwarding. In October, he went to Miami tracking the missing container. He found it.
And as it turns out, it wasn't that hard.
"There was the container, sitting exactly at the address it had been delivered to since December 2013," HAPI's Mossman-Celestin said.
'THEY TOTALLY RIPPED US OFF'
Rays of Hope executive Kim Sorrell said that her organization at first had no reason to think the container was still in the U.S.
"All along, we were promised over and over and over that the container was in Haiti," Sorrell said.
She says the shipper said it was stuck in Haitian customs. After six months, Sorrell became suspicious and tried unsuccessfully to get the FBI to help find the container.
Still, she said, "I believed the guy."
"We all wanted to believe him. We wanted to believe it was in Haiti," she said.
It wasn't until a year later that Rays of Hope began thinking the container might still be in Miami.
"They ripped us off. They totally ripped us off," Sorrell said.
FINALLY GETTING THE CONTAINER TO HAITI
And it's not over. It's been more than a month since the container was found and it's still sitting there. The $20,000 that the charities paid Rays of Hope is gone, along with the shipper. They'll have to pay again to finally get their goods to Haiti.
"To think that now we have to come up with money again to pay for the shipping is really tough," Sorrell said. "We work on a shoestring."
But, she said of the charities she was shipping for, "I'm not going to leave these people hanging."
"They trusted us and we trusted a guy and we all got ripped off," she said.
She said she will do whatever it takes to get the container to Haiti. She talked about making calls for donations.
"It would be an incredible Thanksgiving blessing if anybody watching this said, 'Man, I want to get those medical supplies to Haiti, I want to get that equipment there,' and help us out," Sorrell said.
"It's such a sad thing because everything that's on that container is to help people," she continued. "Every last bit of it."
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