Haitian Special Olympics delegates still missing, Team returns home with 11 Medals

By Shanieka Smith

Features Writer

#USA, June 25, 2022 – Florida police are still trying to find seven delegates of the Haitian Special Olympics team who disappeared during the Games in early June.  The latest is Louis Jacques Wilguens who was last seen disembarking a bus at the All-Star Sports Resort and has not been heard from since.

The first six delegates who went missing from Disneyworld in Kissimmee Florida on June 6^th were in town for the football competition of the Special Olympics.  Only one of the initial six was an actual athlete. The single athlete has an intellectual disability.

The missing men are 32-year-old Antione Joseph Mithon, 20-year-old Nicholson Fontilus, 19- year-old Peter Mianovich Berlus, 18-year-old Anderson Petit-Frere, and 24-year-old Steevenson Jacquet, and 18-year-old Oriol Jean.

They were last seen in the area of the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex, according to a press release from the Osceola Sheriff’s Office.  That was around 2:30 pm on the day the men went missing.

The Police say the men “turned in their room keys, left behind their personal bags and belongings,” and have not been seen since.

The special Olympics ended on June 12th.  Haiti won 11 medals, eight of them in horseback riding including two gold medals, two in the 100-meter hurdles (gold and silver), and a bronze medal in the football competition.  All of the other delegates have made it safely back home.

The Special Olympics USA Games attracted more than 5,500 athletes and coaches from the nation’s 50 states and the Caribbean, according to organizers.