| Fountain Valley massacre | |
|---|---|
| Location | Fountain Valley Golf Course, St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands |
| Coordinates | 17°44′31″N 64°48′52″W / 17.74194°N 64.81444°W |
| Date | 6 September 1972 |
Attack type | Mass shooting, robbery |
| Weapons | Firearms |
| Deaths | 8 |
| Injured | 8 |
| Perpetrators | Ishmael LaBeet, Beaumont Gereau, Meral Smith, Warren Ballentine, and Raphael Joseph |
The Fountain Valley massacre was a mass shooting that occurred on the afternoon of 6 September 1972 at the Fountain Valley Golf Course in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands.[1] The incident left eight resort employees and tourists dead. Another eight were either shot at or wounded.
The perpetrators were five Virgin Islanders, Ishmael LaBeet, Beaumont Gereau, Meral Smith, Warren Ballentine, and Raphael Joseph. Authorities initially believed the five had committed the execution-style shootings in the course of a robbery gone bad, but later developments suggested that the killing was planned by at least one of the perpetrators. Joseph and Ballentine testified at trial that they had expected only to commit a robbery[2] but that things got out of hand because LaBeet was adamant that they also make "a political statement"; LaBeet told them "he was angry about foreigners coming in to take our money and leaving us with nothing." According to Joseph, during the robbery LaBeet suddenly began shooting people, while yelling epithets like "I hate you white motherfuckers!"[2]
All five defendants were convicted after a jury trial in the District Court of the Virgin Islands, a federal territorial court, on multiple charges of murder, assault, and robbery under Virgin Islands law. Each was sentenced to eight consecutive life terms.[3] Led by civil rights activist lawyers William Kunstler and Chauncey Eskridge, the defense at trial argued in part that the accused were politically motivated victims of systematic race-based civil rights deprivation; all the defendants were Afro-Caribbean, while seven of the eight victims were white.
The convictions were affirmed in 1974 by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit,[4] which subsequently also upheld the denial of motions for a new trial.[5]
LaBeet has since denied any involvement in the 1972 shooting.[6]
The public's perception of a racial motivation for the killings and fear of further violence led to a steep decline in tourism to St. Croix, from which the island's tourism industry only recovered decades later.[3]
American musician Sherman Kelly has claimed he was assaulted by some of the same perpetrators three years before the Fountain Valley shooting. While recovering from the assault, Kelly wrote the song "Dancing in the Moonlight" to imagine "an alternate reality, the dream of a peaceful and joyful celebration of life."[7] The song, released in 1970, later became a hit for King Harvest and again for Toploader.
On 31 December 1984, LaBeet (then calling himself Ismail Muslim Ali) hijacked American Airlines Flight 626 while in federal custody on a transfer to a new place of detention, using a handgun stashed in a lavatory.[8] He forced the pilot to land the plane in Havana, Cuba, where LaBeet escaped. He was never recaptured by U.S. authorities. With the thawing of Cuban–American relations in 2015, LaBeet was confirmed to be living at large in Cuba following an indeterminate amount of time spent in a Cuban prison.[9] He was the subject of the 2016 documentary film The Skyjacker's Tale.[10]
Joseph received a pardon from the governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands in 1994 after 22 years' imprisonment, but died four years later of a drug overdose.[3][2] The other three served 29 years in federal prison before being returned to Virgin Islands custody and then retransferred to private prisons in the U.S.[11] As of 2022, they remained incarcerated at the Citrus County Detention Facility, north of Tampa, Florida.[12]