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A North Carolina woman dies after going on a Vodou retreat in Haiti. Her son wants answers.

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A North Carolina woman dies after going on a Vodou retreat in Haiti. Her son wants answers.



“My mom went down to Haiti, they did this last piece of the ceremony, and something sinister happened,” said Timothy Jackson.

A North Carolina man is asking for answers after his mom died while on a Vodou retreat in Haiti.

Dana Jackson, 51, wanted to become a Manbo priestess. A Manbo priestess “is a female ritual specialist in the Haitian Vodou tradition. Like her male counterpart, the oungan (or houngan), she performs ceremonies, initiations, healings, and divinations,” according to an article on the Harvard University website.

Vodou is an African religion and comes from the word Fon which means “God” or “Spirit” and “originated in the ancient kingdom of Dahomey (present-day Nigeria, Benin, and Togo)”, according to an article on the religion by PBS.org. Alternative spellings of the religion include Vodun and Vodoun, but not Voodoo. The spelling Voodoo is considered “the sensationalist and derogatory Western creation,” the article continues.

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Her son, Timothy Jackson, told USA TODAY that this was something that she wanted to do and had been practicing for a few years prior to her trip to Haiti.

“Four years ago, my mom started to do a little bit of research on the African traditional spiritual belief systems and Vodou was a part of that,” he said. “She had kind of been on this path of just kind of doing research and practicing, or at least, just doing her due diligence as far as research is concerned.”

Jackson said that his mom left for Haiti on July 1 and was supposed to return to the United States on July 26. His mom traveled with a group of people who had joined a house in order to participate in the Vodou rituals.

“The people that she went down there with, their name is Sosyete and I believe that that means society in the Turkish language and Nago,” Jackson said. “These weren’t strangers that she went down there with. These are people that she’s built a relationship with.”

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Jackson said the group recently went on a trip to Boston together in June.

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No communication was apart of the Vodou ceremony

During part of the Vodou ceremony, Jackson expected to not hear from his mom.

“If you do any research about that part of the ceremony, even just on Google, it’ll tell you, that’s very sacred and things of that nature,” he said. “So she sent me one last message on the 13th, and she said, ‘we will talk on the 21st going to church tomorrow.‘”

Jackson and his mom spoke every day. The no communication part was nerve-wrecking to him, but he wanted to respect his mother’s decision to participate in the ritual. In the last message he received from his mom on July 21 she asked him to, “pray for her.”

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“That whole entire week just kind of low key, (I was) having anxiety because I’m not able to hear from her, and I know that this is a very important part of the ceremony,” he said. “On the 21st, I didn’t hear anything from her. I did reach out to her at about 5 p.m. on WhatsApp. I didn’t get any response.”

Mom doesn’t respond after Vodou ceremony; son finds out about her death

The next day, Jackson still did not get a message from his mom, and he began to worry.

“I woke up. I’m not gonna lie, I was in a little bit of a panic, because I felt like by now, she at least would have responded to my text,” he said.

Around 5 p.m. on July 22, his grandmother broke the news that his mom had died.

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“The way she told me was, ‘your mom’s not coming back from Haiti.’ So I hung up the phone with her,” he said  “I called her back. I asked her, ‘what did she mean?’ She said, ‘she’s not coming back from Haiti. She passed away.’ I hung up the phone. I called her again.”

After a lot of back and forth between Jackson and his grandmother, he called his grandfather, and he confirmed that his mom had died.

‘Something sinister happened’

In order to confirm his mother’s passing, Jackson reached out to one of the leaders of the group that went to Haiti with his mom. The first thing they asked him was, “how much did he know?”

“To be completely honest with you, my initial thought was my mom went down to Haiti, they did this last piece of the ceremony, and something sinister happened,” he said.

The person that spoke with him told him that his mom had gotten extremely sick during the ceremony. They told him that she kind of fainted. When she regained consciousness, she didn’t know where she was. When a member of the house asked her where she was, she said in Virginia, Jackson said.

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However, Jackson said his family hadn’t lived in Virginia in over a year.

Jackson said they also told him that they brought her to the hospital. At the hospital, she started to have seizures, and they said she had a heart attack and a stroke.

“That was the initial story,” he said. “They said that my mom didn’t bring her medicine. So there was a red flag, because what medicine are you guys talking about? it sounds like they were trying to perpetuate a story.”

Jackson also was supposed to get an update on where his mom’s body is located on Aug. 16 but that still hasn’t happened.

“I haven’t heard anything, he said. “I don’t even think the U.S. Embassy got involved, or even received the necessary paperwork until about four days ago.”

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USA TODAY reached out to the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince, but they did not respond prior to publication.

Remembering Dana Jackson

Although Jackson’s mom had him at a young age, her goal was to work hard to create a better life for them.

In 1999, Jackson said that his mom took a job at a technology company that was based in Savannah, Georgia. In his mom’s role she was to help start the companies operations in the state. During their time in Georgia, Jackson remembers getting his own bathroom. bedroom, attending extracurricular activities and ultimately getting closer to his mom.

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Years later he asked his mom why she decided to relocate.

“I asked her, many years later, ‘why did you decide to move down there?’ She said ‘Tim, I needed that time to learn how to become a mother to my son,’” he said.

Another memory that Jackson shared was in 2017 when his family took a trip to Las Vegas, Nevada where the two ended up meeting rapper Nelly. The rapper ended up turning around and talking to the two before he left the hotel, Jackson said.

“In Vegas, we were getting ready to check into our hotel, and Nelly was coming out. My mom looked at me, and I looked at her, and then we just both chased him,” he said. “That was just how in sync we were.”

GoFundMe created for Dana Jackson’s funeral costs

Jackson created a GoFundMe account for his mom’s funeral and additional costs that he will need in the future.

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“(The GoFundMe was created for) funeral costs, any costs associated with bringing her body back,” he said. “I would like to do an autopsy. I’ve been quoted a price for that.”

His mom told him how she wanted her funeral to go.

“We had a conversation maybe six years ago where she told me she wanted to be cremated, and she told me what her last wishes were,” he said.

Dana Jackson was supposed to turn 52 on Sept. 13, Jackson said.

“We don’t know what happened in the last nine days, but whatever happened, my mom did not go to Haiti not to come back to the United States,” he said.

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North Carolina Supreme Court Lets Stand Greg Lindberg’s Civil Fraud Liability

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North Carolina Supreme Court Lets Stand Greg Lindberg’s Civil Fraud Liability


The North Carolina Supreme Court has decided that it will not, after all, review another legal filing by convicted insurance entrepreneur Greg Lindberg.

The Oct. 17 ruling lets stand a 2023 decision by the state Court of Appeals, which found that Lindberg and some of his affiliated companies were liable for fraud by misleading life insurance companies and a reinsurance firm that he once owned.

“We hold the trial court’s conclusions of law were supported by findings of fact based on competent evidence,” the appeals court judges wrote in the 2023 opinon.

The high court in December 2023 had agreed to review the appeal court’s order, at Lindberg’s behest. But after hearing oral arguments, the Supreme Court justices changed their minds, noting that “discretionary review was improvidently allowed by order on 13 December 2023.”

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No further explanation was offered. But with multiple criminal and civil proceedings stemming from the bribery conviction of and the regulatory crackdown on Lindberg, the appeal court’s 24-page opinion offers a valuable recount of some of the main aspects of the voluminous litigation involving Lindberg since 2016.

“Simply put, Lindberg created a scheme in which he caused $1.2 billon held for Plaintiffs’ policyholders to be invested into other non-insurance companies that he also owned or controlled,” the appellate judges wrote in the opinion in Southland National Insurance Corp., et al, vs. Greg Lindberg, et al.

Lindberg

It all began in 2014 under previous North Carolina Insurance Commissioner Wayne Goodwin, the court explained. Lindberg sought to re-domesticate Southland, Bankers Life Insurance Co., Colorado Bankers Life Insurance Co., and Southland National Reinsurance Corp. to North Carolina. Lindberg struck a special agreement with Goodwin, allowing Lindberg to break what has often been considered a cardinal rule for insurance companies – keeping adequate reserves on hand and under the control of the insurance carrier.

Instead, Lindberg was allowed to invest up to 40% of the insurance companies’ assets into affiliated business entities, and Lindberg soon invested hundreds of millions into non-insurance firms he owned or controlled.

In 2016, Mike Causey defeated Goodwin in the election and took over as insurance commissioner. Causey moved swiftly to reduce the cap on affiliated investments – back to 10%, the court explained.

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Lindberg in early 2018 attempted to bribe Causey with heavy campaign contributions, hoping for a relaxation of the rules as he struggled to “untangle his affiliated investments,” the appellate judges noted. Causey cooperated with federal authorities and wore a recording device during the meeting with Lindberg. Lindberg was convicted of bribery in 2020, had his conviction overturned due to improper jury instructions, then was convicted again in 2024. He’s still awaiting sentencing.

Meanwhile, in late 2018, while Lindberg’s prosecution was pending, it became obvious that Lindberg’s affiliated companies would not meet their obligations to restore funds to cover the life insurers’ policyholder liabilities. NCDOI placed Southland and the other insurance companies under administrative supervision. An out-of-state consultant was put in charge, and deadlines were set for repayment of the assets.

With it becoming clear that Lindberg’s affiliated firms would not meet the deadlines, Southland and the other insurance companies signed a memorandum of understanding and other agreements, restucturing the financial obligations, providing a $40 million line of credit to a company owned by Lindberg, and making the affiliated firms subsidiaries of a newly created holding company, the court explained.

In 2019, Lindberg’s affiliated firms failed to meet the restructuring agreements’ goals and failed to make the affiliated businesses part of the holding company. Southland filed suit, charging fraud.

The trial court in Wake County largely agreed, and the appeals court upheld the lower court’s ruling.

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“Defendants attempt to convince this Court that the MOU’s main purpose was not only to rehabilitate Plaintiffs’ companies, but to ensure Lindberg would continue to benefit from the overall transaction,” the appellate judges wrote. “This argument ignores another of Defendants’ motivations: to make money using capital provided by hardworking, North Carolina policyholders.”

Lindberg’s team claimed that the memorandum of understanding was unenforceable. The appeals court didn’t buy that argument.

“Defendants and Lindberg have enjoyed the benefit of millions of dollars of debt relief provided by Plaintiffs, yet continue to claim the MOU is unenforceable,” the court wrote.

On other arguments the court was equally critical of Lindberg’s assertions.

“Put plainly, Defendants made representations about their ability to perform under the MOU, then just two weeks before performance was due, cited those exact representations as the reason why they could not perform,” Judge April Wood wrote in the opinion.

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And because Lindberg understood the intricacies of the affiliated businesses’ structures, he knew that performance under the MOU was impossible, “yet made representations that induced Plaintiffs to enter into the contract. For those reasons, we hold the trial court did not err in finding Defendants’ actions satisfied the elements of fraud.”

The appeals court remanded part of the case to the lower court to determine remedies available to Southland and the other plaintiff insurance companies.

In November 2024, Lindberg pleaded guilty to $2 billion in fraud in a related prosecution. In July of this year, a federal judge approved a plan to distribute $318 million from the sale of a Lindberg-owned software firm to the life insurance policyholders. In early October, the judge allowed the release of policyholder information so that a special master in the case could finally begin distributing funds to the victims of the fraud.

Read more about Lindberg’s bribery conviction here, and other court rulings here.

Topics
Fraud
North Carolina
Liability

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State senator accused of drunk driving in North Carolina capital city

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State senator accused of drunk driving in North Carolina capital city


RALEIGH, N.C. (WBTV) – A North Carolina state senator was arrested and charged with DWI and other crimes in Raleigh over the weekend, court records revealed.

Wake County records showed 74-year-old Sen. Norman Sanderson was arrested on Saturday, Oct. 18, in the area of Edwards Mill and Trinity roads, which is about half a mile from NC State’s Carter-Finley Stadium.

Records showed Sanderson blew a 0.16 BAC on a breathalyzer test, which is exactly twice the legal limit to drive.

Upon his arrest, Sanderson was charged with DWI, having an open container after drinking and failure to obey a traffic officer.

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He was released from the Wake County jail late Saturday night after he posted a $2,000 bond.

Sanderson is currently in his seventh term in the North Carolina Senate, and previously served one term in the state House.

A Republican, Sanderson represents Carteret, Chowan, Halifax, Hyde, Martin, Pamlico, Warren and Washington counties — all of which are in the northeastern corner of the state.

State Sen. Norman Sanderson was arrested in Raleigh, N.C. on Saturday, Oct. 18.(NC General Assembly/Wake County Bureau of Forensic Services)

Also Read: State representative charged with child sex crimes in North Carolina

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Rain and wind Sunday in North Carolina| Secure objects outdoors and Halloween decorations tonight

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Rain and wind Sunday in North Carolina| Secure objects outdoors and Halloween decorations tonight


Ready for a windy Sunday? Gusts will increase early morning through late afternoon and evening. Saturday night is a good time to secure patio items and Halloween decorations from the Piedmont Triad to the Mountains. Rain and severe storms are possible too.



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