“She took care of us until her last breath.”
That’s how Widlord Thomas described his adopted mother, Roberta Edwards, who was shot to death Oct. 10 by gunmen who then abducted one of the children she served in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
Edwards, 55, was the founder and director of SonLight Children’s Home, where she was an adopted mother for 20 children. She was returning from a trip for gasoline with three of the children when a vehicle pulled in front of her and forced her to stop.
The two teenage passengers fled the vehicle after Edwards told them to run for their lives, members of the missionary’s supporting congregation, the Estes Church of Christ in Henderson, Tenn., told the Associated Press.
Edwards was shot multiple times at the wheel of her vehicle, and the gunmen then grabbed 4-year-old Jonathan “JoJo” Paul and fled in a vehicle with tinted windows, according to fellow missionaries.
“Hearts are breaking for him. And we certainly hope that whoever took him, wherever he is, whoever has him, will return him as soon as possible,” Larry Waymire, a longtime missionary to the Caribbean and friend of Edwards, told the AP.
Church members and missionaries connected to the children’s home say that they have received no ransom demand or communication from the kidnappers.
“Many people in the community are grieving for her death,” said Thomas, who was raised by Edwards at SonLight and now serves as an assistant director of the ministry. “She has been doing the Lord’s work in Haiti for 20 years.”
The Christian Chronicle profiled Edwards as she responded to the devastating 2010 earthquake in Port-au-Prince, which claimed the life of one child at the orphanage.
Edwards built the ministry from the rubble of a collapsed marriage. She moved from North Carolina to Haiti in 1995 with her husband, a native Haitian. Five years later he left, and Edwards’ parents expected her to come home. But by then she already was caring for several orphaned and abandoned children.
“So I decided to stay and do whatever needed to be done,” she said.
The Estes Church of Christ in Henderson, Tenn., began supporting her work, which expanded to include 30 children. She also oversees a nutrition center that feeds about 120 neighborhood children twice per day, five days each week. She works closely with church-supported groups, including Indiana-based Manna Global Ministries.
For her 50th birthday, Edwards’ parents took her on her first real vacation since she moved to Haiti — a Caribbean cruise. She was exploring Grand Cayman when the quake hit.
“I didn’t sleep another night until I got there,” she said. “I had to get home. I had to get to my kids.”
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