SLAIN LAWYER’S PARADISE LOST OST
Anti-trafficking crusader ‘was a target’ on isle
AN American prosecutor whose murder shocked the tiny island state of Yap had made such dangerous enemies that she slept with a machete under her pillow.
Rachelle Bergeron, 33, also took her dog along for protection when she went for a jog around the paradise covered in pristine beaches and surrounded by coral reefs.
But the dog could do little to protect her when she was gunned down last week in front of the modest home she shared with her new husband. Both Bergeron and the dog were shot dead by unknown assailants.
Bergeron, a former New York human-rights lawyer, was the acting attorney general on Yap, an island of 11,000 people in the South Pacific with a big humantrafficking problem.
“It’s the most dangerous job in Yap,” Amos Collins, a family friend, told ABC News.
Collins said he helped Bergeron’s husband, Simon Haemmerling, a local pilot, take her to the hospital after she was shot in the chest and leg at pointblank range Monday night.
In her more than four years on the island, Bergeron was outspoken about ending the child-sex trade on Yap and the other islands that make up the Federated States of Micronesia, where girls as young as 12 are forced to service seamen on ships in the harbors.
The four Micronesian states are an independent republic closely associated with the US, which provides more than 70 percent of the local budget.
In addition to taking on pimps and traffickers, Bergeron had no qualms about chastising her own bosses in the Micronesian government for their failure to act.
“She cared passionately about ending sex trafficking,” said Dorchen Leidholdt, director of Sanctuary for Families, a New York nonprofit where Bergeron worked and which provides counseling and legal services for sex-trafficking victims. “She was acutely aware of the violence involved in child sex trafficking. And she wasn’t afraid of confronting anyone.”
Bergeron’s battle against sex trafficking had taken her around the world. After graduating from law school at the University of Florida in 2010, Bergeron, who grew up in Wisconsin, volunteered with International Justice Mission, a nonprofit that works to protect the poor against violence in South Asia.
“[Her] colleagues remember her fighter spirit and zeal to be the very best lawyer she could be, because that is what she felt the poor deserved,” said Saju Mathew, a regional president of the group.
From 2011 to 2013, Bergeron worked with attorneys in India, preparing legal briefs and conducting research to help people trafficked as slave labor, a spokeswoman for IJM told The Post.
Bergeron continued her crusade in New York, when she volunteered with Sanctuary for Families in lower Manhattan just before she left for Yap.
She produced a video, titled “Not-So-Super,” for the group to warn women about an increase in sex-trafficking during the week of the 2014 Super Bowl at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey.
“She came to us at a really propitious time,” Leidholdt told The Post. “She helped create a very powerful video.”
BERGERON flew to Yap in the summer of 2015, eager to take up the assistant attorney-general position and help children and women on the 118-squaremile island, which also has serious problems with domestic violence. More than 60 percent of those admitted to the hospital in Yap are female victims of abuse,
according to UN reports.
Still, Bergeron appeared to have been happy on the island, which was relatively free of violent crime and where firearms are prohibited. Last year, she married her German husband, who pilots small aircraft for Pacific Mission Aviation, an evangelical aid group. They were about to celebrate their first year of marriage and adopt a local child when Bergeron was killed.
The beginning of Bergeron’s tenure in the attorney general’s office coincided with a disciplinary action against a previous assistant attorney general who resigned in June 2015 and was disbarred, public documents show.
The starting salary was $24,000 a year with an increase to $28,000 after passing Micronesia’s bar exam. Housing was provided, as was a ticket to the island where there are only two flights out a week. At the end of a two-year contract, the government would pay for a flight back home. Bergeron agreed to stay on after her contract and spent much of the last year filling in for the top prosecutor’s job.
MONTHS before starting the job, controversy was brewing on the island after a group of impoverished migrants landed on its shores. The 34 Nepalese and Indian men had been duped by human traffickers on their way to Guam, where they had been promised jobs.
Bergeron found herself in the midst of a contentious debate about the fate of the refugees, who were stuck on the island as federal authorities bickered about what to do with them. They spent a year and a half detained on the docks in makeshift lean-tos, living on meager food handouts and labeled a national security risk.
Bergeron became their advocate, and hers was the lone voice of protest against the national government.
“I don’t think that the situation was handled very well,” she told the Cook Islands News in August 2016, a year into her tenure. “So there were no sorts of checks and balances to ensure whether or not the men were provided with adequate food, what their shelter situation was like, if they needed access to medical care.”
Bergeron went on to criticize the national government for detaining them illegally, not providing them with counsel and keeping them in a state of isolation.
“[The] visitor ban has had a considerable negative impact on the men’s psychosocial well-being as they now have no means of communicating with the outside world,” she said.
The migrants were eventually sent back to their home countries after the UN intervened, but Bergeron wasn’t finished: She demanded radical changes to immigration laws to ensure migrants are dealt with humanely.
“She was selfless in all her work,” said Constantine Yowbalaw, director of youth and civic affairs on Yap and the state’s designated spokesman on Bergeron’s murder. “She’s been very vocal and very selfless in her work.”
Bergeron rose to acting attorney general after her predecessor resigned to become a judge earlier this year, Yowbalaw told The Post. He said she was on a panel charged with choosing his replacement.
But friends said that after receiving many threats, she was looking forward to returning to the US with Haemmerling and the girl they were looking after.
On the night Bergeron was shot, Haemmerling was in the kitchen making brownies.
“She was a target,” said Collins, the family friend. “She had to deal with a lot of the worst things.”
When she wasn’t fighting national authorities, Bergeron was visiting schools and community centers to warn children about sex trafficking. There are numerous photos off hher on theh YapY State Human Trafficking Task Force Facebook page speaking to youths.
Bergeron’s campaign to end sex trafficking in Yap gained traction when a case against two men, including an American, went to the country’s Supreme Court this year.
It resulted in the conviction of William Chunn, a local taxi driver hired “to recruit, transport and deliver minor girls to have sex with sailors on shore leave,” court records say. Chunn would charge johns a fee and deliver girls for sex, court records show.
Between 2015 and 2017, Chunn allegedly worked with Joseph Parisi, a dual US and Italian citizen accused of paying for sex and buying drinks for underage girls. Parisi is reportedly on the lam.
IT’S not clear if Bergeron was actively involved in prosecuting sex traffickers before she died. Yap state court records posted online end at 2017, and Yowbalaw said he did not know what kinds of cases Bergeron was working on.
But after her death, and the recent resignation of an assistant attorney general, there are no prosecutors left in the office.
“It’s empty,” he told The Post. “Only the support staff is there.”
Next week, friends and family plan to hold a memorial service on Yap, where Bergeron was well known to the community.
“We will remember Rachelle most for her love of life and pursuit of justice,” her parents, Tom and Tammy Bergeron, said in a statement last week.
Afterward, the family plans to fly back to the US with Bergeron’s remains. A friend’s GoFundMe campaign has raised more than $28,000 for funeral costs.
There are no suspects in custody and the FBI is now working with local police on the case, Yowbalaw told The Post.