Freelance photojournalist Vladjimir Legagneur was last seen by his wife, Fleurette Guerrier, the morning of March 14, 2018, when he left their home in the capital of Port-au-Prince for another neighborhood in the capital, Grand-Ravine, Guerrier told CPJ.
According to Pierre Michel Jean, Legagneur’s colleague and a member of the Haitian photojournalist organization Kolektif 2 Dimansyon (K2D), Legagneur was working on an independent project in Grand-Ravine, an area known for its high rates of violent gang activity.
Jean said he did not know the topic of Legagneur’s project.
Guerrier told CPJ that she and her husband agreed to check-in by phone every two hours while he was in Grand-Ravine. She first called him around noon on March 14, and he answered but said he was busy. When she called back at the next agreed time, the phone rang but nobody answered. Guerrier told CPJ that this was the last time she was able to reach Legagneur.
Guerrier said that she filed a missing person’s report with Haiti’s investigative police on March 16 after she had searched for him in local hospitals, police stations, and the morgue.
On March 26, Haitian National Police spokesperson Frantz Lerebours said that police did not yet have any information on Legagneur’s whereabouts but said they "fear a fatal outcome," according to news reports.
Lerebours told VOA Creole that police had found skeletal remains and a hat on March 28 near the area where the journalist was last seen. They collected the remains and the hat to be examined by a forensics team. The article did not specify who had last seen the journalist in this area.
As of early July, Haitian authorities had yet to make any results public, according to Radio France Internationale.
According to an April 3 report on the Caribbean news website Loop, Lerebours said that Guerrier identified the hat as that of her husband.
On April 4, Lerebours said police had detained two men who were found with Legagneur’s phone a few days after he vanished, according to news reports.
Haitian President Jovenel Moїse told reporters during a mid-April press conference following the Summit of the Americas in Peru that there was still not proof Legagneur had been killed and called on police to “work 24 hours” to break the case, according to reports.
On May 4, Haitian police announced at a press conference that they had arrested a third person in connection with Legagneur’s disappearance, but did not provide any more details about potential motives.
Legagneur previously worked for Haitian media outlets including the daily Le Matin and the news website Loop Haïti, as well as non-governmental organizations, according to colleagues and news reports.