A former Jacksonville woman is asking a federal judge for mercy in a smuggling case with two brothers from Haiti accused of trying to sneak guns into the violence-plagued Caribbean nation.
“I refuse to debate with the case or go to trial. I take full accountability,” Francesca Charles wrote in a letter from Miami’s Federal Detention Center that was added to a Jacksonville court docket Jan. 5.
Charles, 28, could face up to 20 years in prison along with brothers Jacques Jerry Pierre and Jeff Pierre if they’re convicted of all counts in an October 2025 indictment accusing them of conspiracy, smuggling and illegal shipment of firearms.
Police patrol Port-au-Prince, Haiti near Toussaint Louverture International Airport after reports of more gang shootings, in this photo from February 2025. Haiti’s capital could become overrun by criminal gangs if the international community does not step up aid to a UN-backed security mission there, the UN warned in a January 2025 report.
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News reporting from Haiti and the neighboring Dominican Republic in March 2025 listed the three as having been arrested in Haiti after a shipment of guns headed there was seized in the Dominican Republic in February 2025.
Some of that reporting said the weapons were intended for delivery to 400 Mawozo, a Haitian street gang that gained wide attention in 2021 for kidnapping 17 missionaries with a religious group from Ohio. The gang’s former leader was later extradited to the United States and sentenced in December to life in prison on top of a sentence for gun trafficking.
A release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office about the Jacksonville gun case said that 18 rifles, five handguns and about 36,000 rounds of ammunition had been found in February 2025 in a shipping container labeled as holding ordinary household goods.
Investigators concluded that at least 20 of the 23 seized guns had been bought by Charles or one of the Pierre brothers, said the release. While lumping the defendants together on most points, the release singled out Jacques Jerry Pierre, 32, to say he bought two Barrett .50-caliber rifles, one seized in the Dominican Republic, which prosecutors described as a heavy-duty, military-style weapon commonly mounted on top of vehicles by gangs or cartels.
People protest against gang-related violence and to demand the resignation of Haiti’s transitional presidential council, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, May 15, 2025. Haitians living in Florida fear deportation to the Caribbean nation, saying conditions there are unsafe.
The three defendants bought at least 46 firearms over nine months that ended in February 2025, the U.S. Attorney’s Office release said.
Guns were bought from at least five federally licensed dealers, according to the indictment, which said someone besides the three defendants arranged for the shipping container to be moved from Miami to Haiti and that the gun were never mentioned.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office release said Charles is an American citizen and the Pierre brothers are citizens of Haiti who were considered Florida residents. The defendants traveled to the Dominican Republic three days before the shipping container was intercepted there, the release said.
Locked up in South Florida awaiting transfer for court proceedings, Charles wrote in late December to the federal courthouse in Jacksonville, saying “I feel the need to share remorse toward my terrible actions.” She wrote that two years she had lived in Jacksonville “uplifted my sprits” and motivated her to further a medical career, saying she had earned a medical technology certificate and one as a phlebotomist.
People displaced by armed gang attacks take refuge in the town hall of the Kenscoff neighborhood in Port-au-Prince in this photo from February 2025. According to official sources there were more than 3000 internally displaced people in Kenscoff. Haiti has been mired for decades by political instability, made worse in recent years by criminal gangs that have grown more powerful. Gangs now control 85 percent of the capital Port-au-Prince and children — some as young as eight years old — now make up to half of all armed groups, UNICEF spokesman James Elder told reporters in Geneva.
More: Jacksonville missionaries back in Florida fear for the children and families in Haiti
“I enjoy taking care of my patients as much as I do for my Grandmother at home,” wrote Charles, pleading for a judge (no name is mentioned) to “give me one more chance on Home Detention/Probation for however many years that you feel is necessary.”
Charles hasn’t yet had a court hearing in Jacksonville, but Senior U.S. District Judge Brian Davis has scheduled a trial to begin April 6.
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: 3 charged in Jacksonville with smuggling guns to gang-plagued Haiti