On January 9, a young Sudanese refugee was shot to death by police in Oklahoma while working in a Seaboard Foods pork processing plant, one of the largest meatpacking plants in the country. The plant is located in the remote panhandle region of Oklahoma, in the small town of Guymon. The murder of Chiewelthap Mariar, who was only 26, has drawn outrage from other workers and members of the community.
Mariar had been told by a supervisor he was fired. Sometime later Mariar, still working alongside other workers as instructed by other plant officials, was confronted by the supervisor, with a bunch of Guymon police behind him. According to the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation (OSBI), in a press release the next day, the police had been called in reference to an “excited and disgruntled employee.” They claimed the cops were talking with Mariar when he “produced a knife” and started “advancing on officers.” OSBI said the police shot the young refugee worker with a taser, which was supposedly “unsuccessful,” so they shot him to death. End of story.
Hardly. As it turns out, another worker videoed parts of the incident on his cellphone (he was later fired for doing so). This video has not yet been made public. He spoke with the Guardian, asking to remain anonymous for fear of further retaliation. The worker said that after Mariar was confronted by a supervisor, he was told by Human Resources to finish his shift. He said the supervisor who fired him confronted Mariar on the shop floor after he was fired, and police arrived soon after to remove him. The worker said:
I witnessed the entire thing, from when they started arguing with him until he was shot. He had a company-issued band-cutter in his hand. When the police got to the plant, the guy was already working, minding his own business... They made him out to be a danger when they said he had a knife in his hand, when it wasn’t. And that’s wrong on so many levels.
The worker's cellphone footage leading up to and following the incident shows portions of this.1 According to the worker, who worked in maintenance, the other workers on the production line were told to keep working after the killing:
All they had us do was cover the scene with plastic, and we proceeded to finish what was on the production line. This company fired me for recording the truth they were trying to brush under the mat. They never asked me if I was OK. It was my first time seeing a guy get killed – and then I get fired.
The worker also says they were asked to sign an incident report, despite not agreeing with what was pre-filled out on the report.
Workers and people in Guymon are outraged that the cops were brought in to “settle” a verbal argument. The union, the UFCW (United Food and Commercial Workers), has called for a federal investigation into the killing.
Debbie Berkowitz, a former OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) chief of staff and senior policy advisor and expert on worker safety policy, posted this response on social media:
This is the same plant that underreported injuries and was cited by OSHA for unsafe conditions... This is beyond horrible and outrageous. Young Sudanese refugee killed in Seaboard meatpacking plant—when company called police. His mom was working in the plant too. Then they fired the coworker videotaping this travesty.
When Seaboard Foods opened their plant in 1995, Guymon had a population of barely 6,000 and was dying out. Seaboard, like other large meatpacking plants, created its own “company town.” By promising relatively high wages, it attracted thousands of immigrant workers from North America, Latin America, Africa and Asia. Seaboard employs 2,500 workers, under extremely dangerous working conditions. Guymon has doubled in size since the plant’s opening, with more than a third of its residents foreign born, nearly 60 percent Latino. Some 41 percent of households in the county speak languages other than English at home.
Chiewelthap Mariar's mother was among the tens of thousands of refugees from Sudan who immigrated to the U.S. from the 1980s to the 2000s, hoping to escape poverty, violence, and the civil war in Sudan in the 1990s.2
Instead, her son was murdered in the factory they both worked in. Chiewelthap Mariar is one of the 88 people killed by police in this country already this year (as of January 26, according to the website Mapping Police Violence). This follows 1,176 killed by police last year across the U.S., a record number.
