2 Texas men indicted for plotting to take over Gonâve Island and enslave women & kids
Published by RawNews1st
The pair allegedly wanted to use homeless people to kill Gonâve Island’s entire male population and carry out violent rape fantasies after taking over.
Gavin Rivers Weisenburg, 21, and Tanner Christopher Thomas, 20, were indicted by a grand jury in Texas’s Eastern District on Thursday. Court documents paint a picture of the elaborate plot to take over an island off of Haiti and fulfill violent rape fantasies.
Between August 2024 and July 2025, Weisenburg and Thomas allegedly planned to recruit and hire homeless people in the D.C. area to work as mercenaries to carry out a coup d’etat on Gonâve Island. Gonâve Island is controlled by Haiti and is the largest island off the country’s coast, with a population estimated at between 85,000 and 100,000.
Once they got to the island, the men wanted to murder all the men and turn the women and children into sex slaves, court documents say. They planned to buy a sailboat, guns, and ammunition for the coup.
To make their scheme a reality, the two learned Haitian Creole. Thomas enlisted in the Air Force and messaged Weisenburg on social media, telling him it would help advance the plan.
While he was assigned to Ramstein Air Base in Germany for his initial station, he had himself reassigned to Joint Base Andrews, so he could stay in the U.S. and be nearer to D.C. to aid in recruiting people experiencing homelessness nearby to be part of their” army,” according to court documents.
Meanwhile, Weisenburg enrolled in the North Texas Fire Academy to train in command-and-control protocols — skills he would need, court documents say, for the armed coup. He failed out of school six months later.
Two weeks after being dismissed from the school, he flew to Thailand. There, he planned to enroll in a sailing school to learn to use the boat they planned to buy to reach Gonâve Island, court documents say. But the school was too expensive, and he did not end up enrolling.
At some point in this process, they also allegedly coerced a minor into participating in child pornography that they filmed.
Weisenburg and Thomas were charged federally with conspiracy to murder, maim or kidnap in a foreign country and production of child pornography. If convicted of the first charge, they face up to life in prison, and if convicted of the second charge, they face 15 to 30 years in prison.
