Fountain Valley massacre

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, United States Virgin Islands.^[1] The shooting left eight employees and tourists dead. Another eight were either shot at or wounded.

The perpetrators were five Virgin Islanders whom authorities initially believed to have committed the execution-style shooting in the course of a robbery gone bad. However, in court, the defense, led by civil rights activist William Kunstler, argued in part that the accused were politically motivated victims of systematic race-based civil rights deprivation; all of the defendants were Afro-Caribbean men, while seven of the eight victims were white.

All five men were convicted of multiple charges of murder, assault, and robbery, and each was sentenced to eight consecutive life sentences in federal detention.^[2]

The public's perception of a racially tinged 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 did not begin to recover until decades later.^[2]

On 31 December 1984, one of the shooters, Ishmael LaBeet, hijacked American Airlines Flight 626 while in United States federal custody on a transfer to new detention.^[3] The flight was forced to land in Cuba, where LaBeet escaped. He was never recaptured by the United States and, with the thawing of Cuban–American relations in 2015, was confirmed to be living at large in Cuba following an indeterminate amount of time spent in a Cuban prison.^[4] Three of the five shooters remain in prison; another is deceased.^[2]

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