Released Haitian Immigrant Charged With Bludgeoning Woman to Death in Fort Myers

Surveillance footage captured what Fort Myers Police describe as a merciless sequence: Rolbert Joachim, 40, swinging a hammer against the windshield, hood, and headlights of a dark SUV parked outside the D&D Convenience Store at the Chevron station on 3500 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. When Nilufar Yasmin, the 51-year-old Bangladeshi clerk working the morning shift, stepped outside to confront him, Joachim turned and walked directly toward her. He struck her in the head once, she fell, and then struck her six more times. Police noted she was not armed and had her arms at her sides.

The attack happened around 7:20 a.m. on April 3, 2026, near Highland Avenue. The Fort Myers Police Department launched an immediate manhunt. Three nearby schools went into lockdown. Joachim, wearing a yellow graphic T-shirt, black shorts, and yellow athletic shoes, was taken into custody hours later. ICE assisted FMPD in locating and arresting him. He was booked into Lee County Jail and charged with second-degree murder and criminal mischief for property damage. Yasmin, a mother of two, did not survive. She was 51 years old.

The Department of Homeland Security announced the arrest on April 7, and simultaneously released details about Joachim's immigration history that reframed the case entirely. According to DHS, Joachim was caught crossing the border illegally in 2022 and released into the country by the Biden administration. An immigration judge ordered his deportation that same year. Rather than being removed, he was shielded from that order when the Biden administration granted him Temporary Protected Status. That TPS designation expired in 2024, leaving Joachim with no legal standing to remain in the country and no mechanism enforcing his removal.

TPS is a humanitarian designation that allows nationals of countries facing ongoing armed conflict, environmental disasters, or other extraordinary conditions to live and work legally in the United States on a temporary basis. It does not grant a path to permanent residency, and it does not override a pre-existing deportation order; it suspends enforcement of one. When Joachim's TPS lapsed in 2024, he was once again deportable, but no removal action followed before the April 3 attack.

Prosecutors will now contend with several questions central to the case: whether surveillance footage and physical evidence establish Joachim as the man in the parking lot beyond reasonable doubt, what precipitated the confrontation with Yasmin's car in the first place, and whether the escalation from property destruction to lethal violence meets the threshold for the second-degree murder charge, which in Florida requires a killing that is neither premeditated nor legally justified. The chain of custody for the hammer will be a focal point, as will any forensic evidence tying Joachim to the scene.

The case has become a flashpoint in the ongoing national debate over TPS, a program that currently covers hundreds of thousands of Haitian nationals. A federal judge in February blocked the Trump administration's effort to terminate TPS protections for that population, a ruling that will likely draw renewed scrutiny as the Joachim prosecution moves forward. What remains unchanged, at the center of everything, is Nilufar Yasmin: a woman who walked outside to do her job and never walked back in.