By the time Davy Lloyd told his father he was tired, he had already been beaten badly enough that David Lloyd thought his son might pass out.
Davy was still alive. So were his wife, Natalie, and Jude Montis, the longtime Missions in Haiti leader who had become part of the Lloyd family after 20 years of working beside them. Armed gang members had taken them after a youth service outside Port-au-Prince, and David was on the phone from Oklahoma, trying to understand what was happening, who was in charge and how much money it would take to make the nightmare stop.
“I’m really tired,” Davy told him.
David understood the danger. What he still didn’t believe, even then, was that that would be the last time he spoke to his son.
Kidnappings for ransom had become grimly familiar in Haiti. The Lloyd family had already lived through one years earlier, when Davy and his sister were kidnapped as children and held overnight before being released. David assumed this was another terrifying negotiation, another crisis where the family would pray, scramble and somehow survive.
Instead, Davy, Natalie and Jude were killed by gang members in the country they had spent their lives serving.
Their deaths became international news, but David and Alicia Lloyd’s new book, Strong to the End, is less about the headlines than the lives behind them: a son who grew up loving Haiti, a young wife who willingly embraced a mission field that offered little comfort and a Haitian ministry leader whose faithfulness helped hold the work together for two decades.
Davy Lloyd never had to be convinced to love Haiti. His parents moved there in 1998 after meeting in Bible college and sensing a long-term call to missions. After two years working with another ministry, they launched Missions in Haiti in 2000, planning to stay for the long haul.
Haiti eventually stopped feeling like a place they had gone and started feeling like the place their family belonged.
“After we started having children and then our children became so connected there, we realized this is home now,” David said. “We started saying we were going home when we were headed back to Haiti instead of going home to the States.”
For Davy, Haiti was never just his parents’ calling. It was the landscape of his childhood, the place where his friends lived and where need was close enough to touch.
When he was around 5 years old, a flood displaced children in Gonaïves. A missionary brought a truckload of children back, but the Lloyds could only take in two. Davy was upset even then.
“He said, ‘Someday when I’m the missionary, I’m going to take all the kids and help them,’” David said.
The child who said that grew into a young man who always seemed to have a tool in his hand. Davy liked order. He liked fixing what was broken and building what was needed. Around the mission compound, he was constantly building chicken coops, goat pens or whatever else needed to exist by the end of the day.
When his future mother-in-law asked what he liked to do for fun, Davy didn’t hesitate.
“I like to work,” Davy told her.
To David and Alicia, the answer made perfect sense. Davy found joy in seeing something get accomplished. He could work 12-hour days because the mission field had trained him to see need and respond with his hands.
His practicality never seemed detached from compassion. David said Davy was always watching, learning and preparing for the day he might step into greater leadership. As a college student in the U.S., he struggled at first with culture shock after growing up in Haiti. One pastor later told David he asked his grandson what he had observed about Davy during their first year at Bible college.
“He said, ‘I don’t really know him that well. He was always either working or praying,’” David said.
Natalie entered that world with unusual ease. She didn;t grow up the same way Davy did, but according to the Lloyds, she understood what he was called to and chose it with him. Haiti meant limited movement, few conveniences and no easy escape from the compound when security deteriorated.
“Most girls her age would not go to Haiti and not be able to leave the compound for months on end, not be able to go shopping, not be able to pick up a coffee,” Alicia said. “She sacrificed a lot so she could be there and help Davy do what he felt like God wanted him to do.”
Natalie didn’t treat the children at the mission like an abstract cause. When a child had a scratch, a cut or needed a bandage, she stepped in. David had seen visitors react with discomfort when children crowded close or reached for them. Natalie never did.
“She never had any reaction like, ‘These kids are touching me,’” David said. “She just jumped right in.”
Jude Montis had been jumping in long before Davy and Natalie became the future of the mission. He began working with Missions in Haiti in 2004 and became one of the people David and Alicia trusted most. Their children called him Uncle Jude. His own children later called David and Alicia Grammy and Pappy.
“He was literally one of my best friends that I’ve ever had in my whole life,” Alicia said.
Jude’s faithfulness mattered because the work in Haiti was never simple. Poverty shaped daily life. Instability demanded constant flexibility. The ministry needed people who would not disappear when things became difficult.
“He always wanted to see the kingdom of God advance,” David said. “His main goal was right along with ours.”
By spring 2024, Haiti’s gang crisis had made ordinary life almost impossible. Roads were dangerous. Supplies were controlled or blocked. Schools and churches were under threat. Still, the mission continued. The youth service that night was part of the life Davy, Natalie and Jude were trying to keep intact amid collapse.
The first call came from Jude. His wife had been at the church.
“He said, ‘My wife was at the church, and she said they just grabbed Davy when he came out of the youth service,’” David said. “I hit my knees and started calling out to God.”
David began calling anyone who might know what was happening. He asked one young man who had grown up with Davy to find whoever was in charge and ask how much money they wanted.
“He said there were hundreds,” David said. “They grabbed him, roughed him up and dragged him in.”
According to what David later heard, gang members began arguing over what they had been sent to do. One group wanted to destroy the mission compound, including the church and school. Another group reportedly said they had only been sent “to kill the white guy and his kids.”
David believes “the white guy” meant him, and the group did not realize he had left Haiti the day before. Nearly two years later, the motive remains painfully unclear.
“Why? We still don’t understand why they were sent there,” David said.
The Lloyds had never paid gangs for protection, David said. Their posture in the area had been different: If someone was hungry, they fed them. The mission ran a commercial bakery, and anyone who came asking for bread could receive it for free.
In the middle of the confusion, Davy was still alive. Bruised, exhausted and held by men who would soon kill him, he did something witnesses later repeated to his family: He preached.
“He stood and continued to preach and tell them God would forgive them and He loved them and cared about them,” Alicia said.
For Alicia, that detail did not erase the horror. But it did speak into the question she had been asking in the rawest days after the killings.
“I questioned and said, ‘God, where were You when my kids were killed? Why didn’t You intervene?’” Alicia said.
Then she heard what Davy had done.
“I knew God had to have been with him,” Alicia said. “For him to be able, because he was in really bad shape after being beat, and yet there’s testimony that after that he stood and continued to preach and tell them God would forgive them and He loved them and cared about them. So I know that God was with him.”
David says the same thing as a father who has replayed the night more times than he can count.
“It was only supernatural strength that Davy had,” he said. “He was able to continue to preach till his dying breath and just communicate the love of Christ to these people.”
The Lloyds talk about grief in present tense because there is no other honest way to talk about it. Time has moved forward. The story has become a book. People have told them how much Davy, Natalie and Jude’s lives have meant. But grief still arrives without warning.
“You have to go through all the emotional grief again,” David said.
Writing Strong to the End helped at first because it gave David and Alicia a way to organize the pieces of what happened. Alicia wanted to understand the timeline, even knowing there were parts of the final hours they would never fully know.
“I wanted to get it all sorted out,” Alicia said. “But then I’m to the point now I can’t read it again because it’s just too painful.”
For David, working on the book became part of staying upright. Teaching at Bible college, traveling, continuing the ministry and helping tell the story of Davy, Natalie and Jude gave them something to carry when the grief felt too heavy.
“Alicia and I, we both are people that like to be doing,” David said. “Knowing that we could do this and it could be their story and be used for the Kingdom of Heaven, we were staying busy.”
The question they have had to live with is not only why something so brutal happened, but what faithfulness looks like after it does. David said a friend helped him understand the question would eventually shift.
“She said, ‘It’s OK to continue to ask God why, but then there’s got to become a point that you say, what now, God?’” David said. “We had to transition to that.”
The “what now” includes justice. David and Alicia do not pretend forgiveness means indifference to evil. They want accountability. They want the people of Haiti to stop living under the control of gangs who have made daily life unbearable.
“I don’t think they would want us to hold a grudge to those that are responsible for this,” David said. “Although we want to see justice. We want to see the situation resolved.”
More than anything, the Lloyds believe Davy, Natalie and Jude would want people to remember Haiti beyond the violence. The country they loved is still suffering. Families are still living with fear that the next trip outside could be their last. Churches, schools and businesses cannot function freely when gangs control movement, fuel and food.
“They’re facing it daily,” David said. “They can’t even live their life without being in fear that it could be their last.”
When David talks about hope, he begins with the young people who carry the fruit of the mission forward. One young woman from the orphanage recently graduated from nursing school. Others continue leading prayer meetings despite the instability around them. During a recent trip back, David and Alicia attended a four-hour prayer meeting led by children and staff from the mission.
It’s difficult to look at Haiti right now and see anything simple. David and Alicia know what violence has taken. They know what grief has cost. But they also know what Davy, Natalie and Jude gave their lives to, long before the world learned their names.
“It’s amazing to see that even in the midst of their hopelessness, God is helping them keep their hope,” David said.
