Three years before the raid, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide had been overthrown in a military coup. The residents of Raboteau, fiercely loyal to Aristide, had continued to hold rallies opposing the military dictatorship that replaced him. Their defiance made them targets. When soldiers arrived before dawn on April 22, 1994, they went house to house, beating and arresting residents -- including children and the elderly. Some were forced to lie in open sewers. Those who ran were shot. The military then forbade families from collecting their dead, making an accurate count impossible. Journalists on the scene estimated at least 30 killed. Court proceedings later confirmed at least six known dead. Human rights lawyers put the figure between eight and fifteen. The true number may never be known, swallowed by a regime that counted silence among its weapons.

It took until the year 2000 for the case to reach trial. Fifty-nine people were charged with roles in the massacre, but only 22 were in custody. The other 37, including coup leader Raoul Cedras, former police chief Michel Francois, and paramilitary leaders Emmanuel Constant and Louis-Jodel Chamblain, were tried in absentia. International lawyers Mario Joseph and Brian Concannon of the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux helped prosecutors build the case. After six weeks, the jury convicted 16 of the 22 defendants present, acquitting six. Twelve received life sentences; four received terms of four to nine years. All 37 defendants tried in absentia were convicted and sentenced to life at hard labor. For a country where impunity had long been the rule, the verdict felt like a turning point.

The turning point did not hold. By 2005, one of the imprisoned defendants had died, and the remaining fifteen had reportedly escaped. Then, on May 3, 2005, Haiti's Supreme Court overturned every sentence from the trial, ruling that the Criminal Tribunal of Gonaives had not been competent to hear the case because it had been established with a jury. Amnesty International called the ruling "a huge step backwards." The legal framework that had produced Haiti's most significant human rights conviction dissolved in a single decision. The perpetrators who had fled the country remained free. Those who had escaped prison were never returned. The families of the dead were left with verdicts that no longer existed.

The pursuit of justice continued abroad, producing episodes stranger than fiction. Emmanuel "Toto" Constant, the paramilitary leader, fled Haiti on foot into the Dominican Republic and eventually reached the United States. He was detained by immigration authorities, but his relationship with the CIA complicated his case. Secretary of State Warren Christopher advocated for his deportation, arguing that failing to act would suggest American support for Constant's activities. A deportation order was issued but never executed. Constant was eventually freed with a gag order -- and was later convicted of mortgage fraud, receiving a sentence of 12 to 37 years in a New York prison. Colonel Carl Dorelien, who oversaw military discipline during the coup, also fled to the United States. In 1997, he won $3 million in the Florida Lottery. A federal court later found him civilly liable for torture and extrajudicial killing, ordering $4.3 million in damages. His lottery winnings were garnished, and in 2008, the seized assets were distributed to the Raboteau victims -- a measure of accountability extracted not by criminal law, but by the improbable intersection of a lottery ticket and an international human rights statute.

Raboteau is still a shantytown by the sea. Gonaives itself has suffered further catastrophes, including devastating floods from Tropical Storm Jeanne in 2004 that killed thousands. The massacre of 1994 sits in a long sequence of violence and hardship that has defined life in this part of Haiti. What distinguishes the Raboteau case is not that justice was ultimately achieved -- it was not -- but that it was attempted at all, in a country where the powerful had rarely been held accountable for anything. The trial of 2000 demonstrated that Haitian courts could undertake complex human rights prosecutions. Its reversal demonstrated how fragile those gains remained. The neighborhood endures, its story carried less by monuments or memorials than by the memories of the people who survived that April morning and the lawyers who spent years trying to make their suffering matter in a courtroom.