One boat took Jean-Baptiste Metellus away from Haiti, far from his dying farming village and to within a few hundred meters of a better life. Another boat brought him back on Saturday, his body wrapped in a plastic bag marked "John Doe" and stacked in a shipping container with dozens more corpses.
The remains of the 59 migrants, killed on May 4 when their boat capsized off the nearby Turks and Caicos Islands, were buried in a common grave in the northern Haitian city of Cap-Haitien after officials said most had decayed beyond recognition. The decision angered relatives who were denied the chance to identify their loved ones.
"God will welcome each one of you, our compatriots. You should not have had to take to the seas and leave your country," the Reverend Hubert Constant, the archbishop of Cap-Haitien, said after blessing the 28 male and 31 female victims, whose bodies arrived by cargo ship, stored in black plastic bags labeled either "John Doe" or "Jane Doe."
More than 160 migrants were believed to have been aboard the overloaded sloop when it capsized minutes from the Turks and Caicos' shore, pitching passengers overboard, most of whom didn't know how to swim.
The bodies of 61 migrants were recovered and more than a dozen are missing and presumed dead. Some had been eaten by sharks. Two bodies were buried in Turks and Caicos.
The 78 survivors claim a Turks and Caicos boat rammed their vessel twice before it capsized, but the British territory's government says the migrants were being towed to shore when the boat flipped in rough waters. A British-led investigation is due to be complete in a few weeks.
The number of Haitian migrants intercepted on their way to US shores has shot up recently, with nearly as many stopped last month as in all of last year, according to the US Coast Guard.
"It's like trying to fly across the Atlantic in an airplane that hasn't had an oil change in four years. It's extremely dangerous and not worth the risk," US Coast Guard Petty Officer James Judge said of the migrant voyages.
But many Haitians say they have little choice but take that risk given their grim circumstances.
Haiti has suffered through repeated coups, a brutal right-wing military regime and a bloody 2004 uprising that toppled president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Unemployment and despair are rife, leading thousands to flee in rickety boats each year.
"There's no factories here, no jobs, no nothing," said 25-year-old taxi driver Newton Ambroise, who said he had several friends of the ill-fated boat, all of whom survived.
Metellus wasn't as lucky. The 36-year-old father of two scraped earned US$3 a day selling lottery tickets in rural Trou-Du-Nord, a jobless, ramshackle farming town in northeastern Haiti.
One day earlier this month he told his family he was traveling to Cap-Haitien for a friend's first communion. They never saw him again. When he got to town, he boarded the boat and set out to join a godfather living in the Turks and Caicos.
"Now he's gone and he didn't leave anything for his children. His wife is at home crying. She can't do anything," said Adius Basil, a half brother of Metallus who traveled by bus to recover his body.
Instead, he was told that all the remains had to buried immediately because most were already badly decomposed.
"We never would have wanted him to be buried this way," said another brother, Max Metellus, said as workers lowered the coffins into a common grave, one stacked on another, in Cap-Haitien's St. Philomene cemetary as hundreds looked on.
Fifty-nine unmarked white crosses were placed above the grave, one for each victim.
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