A Strike Gone Wrong...

Brutal Fight Causes Many Deaths

Yesterday, the ninth of September, a strike to give the plantation workers more pay went south. The fight ended when the police had to get involved and break up the fight, but not before 20 people lay dead in the streets of Kauai.
The people who made up 70% of the plantation workers, the Filipino’s, went on a strike yesterday in Hanapepe, Kauai. The deaths included the beatings of 4 police officers and 16 Filipino plantation workers.
The fight is said to have started when police suspected that the strikers had two “prisoners” in their camp. When the police heard this they acted on it and went to investigate in the camp of the strikers. From this point it is uncertain how the spark got fanned but we do know it turned ugly pretty fast. There were eight or ten police officers carrying rifles against less than 600 Filipinos with who knows how many carrying weapons.
We interviewed a witness (Lindsay Faye) to learn that the Filipinos who fought had pistols up against the policemen with rifles. “It wasn’t a real battle; it was a slaughter, really” says Lindsay Faye, a witness to the fight. Soon after the breakout National Guardsman hurried down to the fight scene to break everything up. When we fight over money we become angered, when we die over it we become regretful.