Missionary Daniel Pye jailed after sexually abusing children in Haitian orphanage

A missionary has been sentenced to 40 years in prison for sexually abusing children while he ran an orphanage in Haiti.

Daniel Pye, 36, was sentenced in a Miami courtroom on Wednesday (10 January) following a week-long trial in November where he had been found guilty of abusing girls as young as six at the orphanage on the Caribbean island.

Pye ran the orphanage in Jacmel, a port town on the south coast of Haiti, between 2006 and 2012. The complex provided shelter, food and a school to children without families or whose families could not afford to keep them.

But the US Department of Justice said: "Pye would regularly sexually abuse the female residents of his orphanage, including girls as young as six years old."

It added that Pye would "routinely" abuse girls either at the orphanage or at a nearby beach.

He was found guilty of travelling to a foreign country with the purpose of engaging in illicit sexual conduct with a minor. The court also ordered him to spend 25 years under supervised release after his jail term.

Pye was able to raise cash for the orphanage "through his connections with numerous religious organisations and other non-profit groups in the United States", said the Department of Justice.

After leaving Haiti, Pye, originally from Florida, lived in Texas and Arkansas.

He worked for the Liberty Hill School District in Texas between 2013 and 2016 as a teaching assistant and also drove the school bus. He left the school district on good terms and had never been disciplined.