By Sophie Rosenthal, WUSA 9, Nov. 21, 2025
D.C. homeless people, an international invasion, kidnapping and murder. These were the center of a plot prosecutors say was thought up by two Texas men — landing them in jail and facing life in prison.
Gavin Rivers Weisenburg, 21, and Tanner Christopher Thomas, 20, were indicted by a grand jury in Texas's Eastern District on Thursday, and court documents paint a picture of the elaborate plot the two planned for almost a year to take over an island off of Haiti and fulfill violent rape fantasies.
The plan went as follows. Weisenburg and Thomas allegedly wanted 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. Once they got to the island, they wanted to murder all of the men and turn the women and children into sex slaves, court documents say. They planned to buy a sailboat, guns and ammunition to use in the coup.
In order to make their scheme a reality, the two learned Haitian Creole. Thomas enlisted in the Air Force, and messaged Weisenburg on social media to tell him it would help further the plan. When he was assigned to Ramstein Air Base in Germany for his initial station, he had himself reassigned to Joint Base Andrews, so that he could stay in the U.S. and be nearer to D.C., so that he could try to recruit 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 the 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 how to use the boat they planned to buy to get to Gonâve Island, court documents say. But the school was too expensive, and he did not end up enrolling.
Both of them also apparently made specific operational and logistical plans, court documents say. At some point in this process, they also allegedly coerced a minor to be in child pornography that they filmed.
This week, 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 between 15 and 30 years in prison.
Gonâve Island is controlled by Haiti and is the largest island off of the country, with population estimates of between 85,000 and 100,000 residents.
Posted Dec. 3, 2025