Roche — the multitalented cultural editor at the now defunct Le Matin newspaper, who also worked on radio and TV, and was a published poet — was kidnapped from his car on July 10 in the Nazon area of the capital Port-au-Prince. Four days later, the 43-year-old’s body was found by a roadside, handcuffed, riddled with bullets, burned, and mutilated.
Florida’s Tampa Bay Times, which worked with Roche, interviewed a colleague of the journalist at the time who said Roche’s kidnappers sold him to a political gang that wanted him dead for sympathizing with the opposition Group of 184, which supported the uprising against left-wing President Jean Bertrand Aristide in 2004. Roche’s second group of captors demanded US$250,000 in ransom, but the family could only come up with $10,000.
“It seems he was accused of sympathizing with the loose coalition of politicians, businessmen and intellectuals, known as the Group of 184, which led calls for Aristide’s removal last year,” the paper wrote.
Roche was a widely respected journalist who also had a sports show on Radio Ibo and wrote about the environment. On top of that, he was an accomplished poet.
The manner of Roche’s torture mirrored his poem Survivre, which described how he would never give up his “dream,” even if his eyes were “put out” and his mouth was “shut.”
In September 2024, CPJ spoke to four friends and former colleagues of Roche who confirmed that he was likely killed because of his association with the Group of 184.
The Group of 184’s co-founder, Andre Apaid, told CPJ that Roche was never a member of the anti-Aristide group, but the journalist interviewed some of its leaders on the national television show that he hosted.
“He (Roche) became very close to the group because of his role in the media helping to project our vision for a new Haiti,” said Apaid.
The armed rebellion that toppled Aristide was followed by widespread political and gang violence and the deployment of United Nations peacekeepers in a bid to restore order.
During this time of unrest, the Group of 184 worked to build bridges between political forces and civil society to end the violence, a mission that Roche believed in.
Roche was close to intellectuals on the left, including the famous radio journalist Jean Dominique, who was murdered in 2000 after speaking out against Aristide, which may also played a role in his death, Roche’s friends and former colleagues told CPJ.
“Jacques was a softer version of Jean Dominique,” said Apaid, adding that like Dominique, Roche grew disillusioned with Aristide and that’s why he gravitated to the Group of 184.
“He was a very big bridge between us [the Group of 184] and society in general through his media role, hosting us on his show,” he said. “He was very vocal, and I think some of those people, on the militant left, they saw him as a traitor. It was a very unforgiving time.”
Prominent Haitian film director and former culture minister Raoul Peck accused Aristide’s party, Lavalas, of being behind Roche’s death.
“There is no doubt in my mind that [his television work] was the motive. It was a war between Lavalas and the Group of 184,” Joseph Guyler Delva, president of the Haitian media advocacy group, SOS Journalists, told CPJ in September 2024. “His media profile and his connection to the Group of 184 — that was his death sentence,” he added.
Pierre Esperance, head of Haiti’s National Human Rights Defense Network (RNDDH) told CPJ that Roche’s work for the Group of 184 likely put a target on his back.
“Roche was a well-known public voice and he was very active with the Group of 184,” he said.
The Group of 184’s Apaid, as well as Delva, and Esperance, told CPJ that they had reviewed documents from the police investigation into Roche’s killing, which alleged that it was carried out by to a gang of Aristide loyalists in the Port-au-Prince shantytown Cite Soleil.
On August 30, 2007, Alby Joseph, 22, and Chéry Beaubrun, 16, members of a gang in Port-au-Prince’s Solino neighborhood, were sentenced to life in prison for Roche’s murder. The young men said they had been hired to watch Roche from July 10 to July 14 and killed him when they did not receive the full ransom.
Joseph and Beaubrun identified three other gang members, in police custody for illegal weapons possession, who they said were also involved in Roche’s murder. SOS Journalists’ Delva and RNDDH’s Esperance told CPJ that the three men were never charged with Roche’s killing and their whereabouts were unknown.
CPJ could not determine whether Joseph and Beaubrun were still in jail following two major prison breaks in March 2024, in which more than 4,000 inmates escaped.
Apaid and others said the investigation into Roche’s murder lost steam after 2007 due to efforts by the Haitian government to negotiate an end to the political violence.
"Nothing was done about this case. Several people whose names were mentioned in this revolting crime have never been prosecuted by the courts. They were never indicted or arrested," Haiti’s national ombudsman, Renan Hédouville, who heads the Office for the Protection of the Citizen, told CPJ in September 2024.