When two young American missionaries were attacked and killed in Haiti, observers first believed they had been shot.

But the true extent of their appalling torture at the hands of brutal rival gangs only came to light recently. Warning: It makes very disturbing reading.

Natalie Lloyd, 21 - Missouri politician Ben Baker's daughter - and her husband Davy, 24, were killed alongside their Haitian colleague Judes Montis, 20, on May 23, 2024.

At the time, Donald Trump shared a post to his Truth Social page about the couple, saying: 'God bless Davy and Natalie. Such a tragedy. Haiti is totally out of control. Find the killers NOW!!!' 

In a new book, Strong To The End, Davy's parents David and Alicia Lloyd - who also worked as missionaries in the troubled country and were visiting the US at the time of the attack - have bravely described everything they've managed to glean from what really happened that dark day.

Around 2pm, a couple of young guys with guns stopped by Judes's house. Was Pastor David around, they wondered.

Soon thereafter, three guys went into the bakery asking for me. People in the area began to feel that something wasn't quite normal.

The 4pm youth service proceeded. Outside, a young man named Puchon, perhaps 22 or 23 years old, was hanging out at the corner.

As the youth crowd began to disperse that afternoon, and Davy started to cross the street, Puchon was seen giving a curious hand signal. A minivan pulled up behind him. Guys with big guns jumped out, tied Davy's hands behind his back, and rushed him through our gate into our compound.

Our fullest information comes from Jonas Charles, whom we had raised from the age of six, after he had been dropped off at a malnourishment clinic. Nobody ever came back to get him and he has been with us ever since, growing up alongside Davy.

On this day, he happened to be working nearby and saw Davy being pushed through the gate with a gun to his head.

Rather than trying to reason with his captors, Davy opted to take a head-on spiritual approach.

'The Devil has told you to come here and destroy stuff,' he declared. 'This is wrong; you need to repent of your sin.'

'Shut up!' his captors retorted.

The longer he pressed his point, the more agitated the gang became, ridiculing and kicking him.

'If you keep carrying on like this,' they threatened, 'we'll kill you and everybody in this place.'

They then opened the gate to allow a large group of their partners into the compound yard.

Jonas, Natalie, and all the young people ran for the shelter of the House of Compassion (what we call the 'big house'), climbing up to a second-floor porch to watch.

'Open up!' the gang yelled as they pounded on the main door below. 'If you don't open the door, we're gonna shoot him right here and then come in anyway.'

At that point Davy instructed his staff to go ahead and unlock the door. The mob surged inside and headed up the central staircase, jerking Davy along with them.

Soon Davy and his assailants were at the entrance to his and Natalie's upstairs apartment. He refused to be intimidated.

'God loves you guys,' he kept saying. 'He will forgive you. Jesus is your real hope. If you ask him, he'll save you and give you a place in heaven.'

The response: 'Shut your mouth, white boy! The God you're talking about is not our priority right now. We want what we came for. Just get it for us.'

More threats and more punches followed as they rushed him inside the apartment, where ministry files, computers, and a safe awaited. The gang tried to get it open but couldn't solve the combination lock.

Within minutes, Davy was dragged out onto the landing, his head now badly bloodied. Natalie, enraged, started to hit one of the guys, who only hit her back. Davy got to his feet to try to protect his wife. He promptly got slammed into a corner of the concrete wall.

The gang then drafted some of our teenage boys to drag the safe out of the apartment onto the central landing. It was bounced down the staircase, then loaded onto the back of one of our mission's Nissan pickup trucks.

Other loot was piled on as well - appliances, solar panels, computers, even Davy's and Natalie's cell phones.

The gang seemed to be in a hurry. 'Go! Go!' somebody shouted. 'We have to get out of here before the next group shows up!'

The prime motivation seemed to be greed, plain and simple. Was it because they feared the incoming peacekeepers from Kenya that the United Nations was organizing? No doubt they had already seen heavy C-130s with American markings flying in equipment to support the intervention.

Did that make them think they needed to 'get while the gettin's good' in order to sell stuff quickly on the street and then go into hiding?

Nobody knows for sure. One thing is fairly clear: this gang operation had been well planned.

By now, Judes had come hurrying from his home nearby to see if he could help. With our compound gate now open, neighbors and church members also began flooding into the yard. They untied Davy's hands and urged him to seek medical care.

'I can't go right now,' he replied. 'I have to make sure all the kids are okay. Let me get a few things settled here, and then we'll see.'

He told them to close the main gate and back up the mission's three-ton truck against it, making any new intrusions difficult.

Natalie voiced the question on everyone's mind: 'Davy, what if they come back? What are we going to do?'

Her fears - and those of the first gang - were all too quickly realized. A new gang leader jumped the gate and landed on our big truck's roof, firing his weapon wildly. Gunshots began ringing out in greater volume than ever as three busloads of guys plus a lot of motorcycles came roaring into the neighborhood.

One of our teachers, pregnant, was punched in the stomach and told: 'Nobody's leaving.'

Just then the guy on top of our truck came tumbling down - perhaps a victim of his own gang's 'friendly fire.'

Bullets were flying in all directions. While most people ran back to the big house, Davy, Natalie, and Judes ran in the other direction, to the house we had built a few years before as our personal residence. Its main advantage: a Starlink satellite connection for more stable communication.

After this, the details become slim. There are no eyewitnesses to tell what happened inside the small house over the next hours - except for the gang members themselves.

We don't even know how many were present to carry out the final atrocities. There is no surveillance video. And maybe we don't want to know the ghastly particulars.

We only know what those watching from the big house could see and hear from across the compound yard. They tell us that the hail of bullets eased off around 9pm. In between gunshots, they could still hear Davy's voice continuing to press his case.

'God will forgive you if you ask,' he would say. He would quote Scripture in Creole.

Sadly, the offer fell on deaf ears. The staff watching from afar began seeing flames in the windows of the small house.

At 10.46pm Yanick, a young staff member, reported that the gang had stopped by the big house to say: 'We're finished now. We killed the two whites and the "bad guy" (meaning Judes). You can all go on to bed.'

After getting a water hose to douse the fire, Jonas had gone inside to find the charred bodies of the two men. Judes's was the more severely scorched.

Natalie, still breathing heavily, lay at Davy's side. But it wasn't long before she, too, was gone.

Eventually, a Haitian judge, acting in the role of coroner, produced a written statement. The translation reads in part:

'I saw the body of a white female (nationality American). Her body had been tortured, mistreated, and her skin was torn with burns. Her hair was wet with blood coming from her nose and right ear, and her body was full of burns and blisters on all of her left side. There were traces of beatings on her chest and abdomen.

'She had 12 burn spots on her lower and upper body. There was a cut under her lower right ear.

'Regarding the body of Davy, a young man of American nationality: All of his lower body was charred. The burns start from the right armpit to the right side; the leg had been cut off before being burned.

'On his left side, it was charred from the bottom of the foot all the way to his jaw. His face and his skull contained serious burns. There was blood clotted on his right jaw, so the skin of his right side was basically missing.

'There was a stab wound over his right eyebrow. Traces from beating and blisters are observed on his left arm and hip.

'His visceral organs at the level of the waist are missing. Because of the degree of the burns, I cannot tell the method of the disembowelment.'

A careful examination of the bodies showed no ammunition punctures at all. In other words, early news reports that the trio had been shot were faulty. They died in far more agony over long minutes or even hours.

Two years on, I still sometimes notice Alicia quietly crying at church when various songs celebrate 'the goodness of God,' or when she hears 'surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.'

'I'm not mad at God,' she says. 'I just have questions.' 

I share her disappointment. On some days, my mind can't make sense of all the stuff we're going through. But in my heart, I know that God has not abandoned us. 

On other days, it's the reverse: My heart has no feeling of God's presence, but my head tells me he is with me nonetheless.

The Christian life is not meant to be a chase after comfort and ease. The focus instead for us all needs to be on what Jesus asks of us here in a messy and sometimes dangerous world.

Excerpted from Strong to the End: The Simple Service and Sudden Sacrifice of the Martyrs in Haiti by David and Alicia Lloyd with Dean Merrill. (©2026) Published by Moody Publishers. Used with permission.