Before September 6, 1972, St. Croix was building a reputation as a Caribbean paradise for American tourists -- golf courses, resort hotels, the promise of warm water and easy living. After that date, the island's name carried a different association entirely. On that Wednesday afternoon, five armed men entered the Fountain Valley Golf Course and opened fire, killing eight people -- tourists and resort workers -- in a mass shooting that was, by the perpetrators' own framing, racially motivated. The victims were overwhelmingly white; the gunmen were Black Virgin Islanders. The violence shattered more than lives. It shattered the economic model on which St. Croix had been building its future.
The Fountain Valley Golf Course sat in the interior of St. Croix, part of a resort complex that catered to mainland American tourists. On the afternoon of September 6, 1972, five men -- Ishmael LaBeet, Beaumont Gereau, Meral Smith, Warren Ballentine, and Raphael Joseph -- arrived at the course and began shooting. Eight people were killed. Another eight were shot at or wounded. The dead included both tourists and employees of the Rock Resort facility.
The attack was not random in the way a robbery gone wrong might be. The defense at trial would later argue that the accused were politically motivated, framing their actions as a response to systematic racial oppression. All five defendants were Afro-Caribbean. Seven of the eight people they killed were white. Whatever the gunmen believed they were accomplishing, the immediate reality was eight people who did not come home -- people who had been playing golf, or working a shift, on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon.
All five men were convicted after a jury trial in the District Court of the Virgin Islands on multiple charges of murder, assault, and robbery. Each received eight consecutive life sentences. But the legal resolution did not end the story. The racial motivation behind the killings, combined with the fear of further violence, triggered a devastating collapse in St. Croix's tourism industry. Visitors stopped coming. Hotels emptied. The economic damage rippled outward through restaurants, taxi services, dive shops, and every other business that depended on tourist dollars. The island's tourism economy would not fully recover for decades.
For the people of St. Croix -- Black and white, born there and transplanted -- the massacre opened wounds that were difficult to discuss and impossible to ignore. The racial tensions the perpetrators claimed to be responding to were real. The poverty, the inequality, the legacies of colonialism and slavery on an island that had been traded between European powers for centuries -- none of that was invented. But the response of killing eight people at a golf course addressed none of it, and made much of it worse.
The aftermath extended far beyond St. Croix's shores. On December 31, 1984, Ishmael LaBeet -- by then using the name Ismail Muslim Ali -- hijacked American Airlines Flight 626 while being transferred between federal detention facilities, using a handgun that had been hidden in a lavatory. The plane was diverted to Cuba, where LaBeet was prosecuted for aircraft hijacking, sentenced to ten years, and served seven. With the thawing of Cuban-American relations in 2015, he was confirmed to be living at large in Havana. He became the subject of a 2016 documentary film, The Skyjacker's Tale.
Raphael Joseph was pardoned by the governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands and released from prison on December 22, 1994. He died of a drug overdose four years later. The remaining convicted men were still incarcerated as of 2022 at the Citrus County Detention Facility in Florida, more than fifty years after the shooting.
The Fountain Valley Golf Course continued to operate for years after the massacre, though it never fully shed its association with the events of 1972. For visitors to St. Croix today, the name Fountain Valley carries a weight that most Caribbean place names do not. It is a reminder that the tensions of race, class, and colonial legacy that run through Caribbean history are not abstractions confined to textbooks. They have erupted into violence, and that violence has had consequences that lasted generations.
St. Croix eventually rebuilt its tourism economy, though the process took decades and the island never regained the momentum it had before September 1972. Today, tourism accounts for roughly 60 percent of the U.S. Virgin Islands' GDP, and cruise ships call regularly at Frederiksted. The island's beauty is undiminished -- the reefs, the bioluminescent bays, the rolling green hills. But Fountain Valley is part of the island's story too, a place where eight people died and an entire community's trajectory changed. Remembering them honestly, without either sensationalizing the violence or minimizing the conditions that produced it, is the difficult work that St. Croix continues to do.
Located at 17.74N, 64.81W in the central interior of St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. The former golf course area is in the island's midlands, surrounded by rolling hills. Henry E. Rohlsen International Airport (TISX/STX) is approximately 4 nm to the south-southwest. Christiansted is approximately 5 nm to the east-northeast, and Frederiksted approximately 5 nm to the west. St. Croix is the largest of the U.S. Virgin Islands, clearly visible from cruising altitude as a roughly east-west oriented island.