Guymon, Oklahoma, is a town in the dusty Oklahoma panhandle.
It was a dying town until the pork plant came in the 1990s. In 2014, an Oklahoma newspaper gushed (here),
“On the northeast corner of town, cradled by a cluster of dilapidated trailer homes, sits a business that many credit for starting it all. Seaboard Foods is a plant where some 2,600 employees slaughter and process 19,000 hogs daily. Work on the floor can be hard and dirty, and many in town admit it’s the type of labor some white people simply won’t do. Most employees are people of color, many of them Hispanic.
“Yet the nationality of Seaboard’s employees seems of little importance to Guymon authorities. They’re more likely to note that every dollar that Seaboard earns generates seven for the local economy. Vicki McCune, the Guymon community and economic developer, acknowledges she probably wouldn’t have a job if Seaboard hadn’t opened its meat processing plant …. ‘The population was around 6,000 and dwindling,’ McCune recalled. ‘Main Street was nearly dried up. People just don’t understand how bad things were prior to Seaboard coming in.’”
But the pork plant has a dark side, too. In 2018, the company was fined $1 million for employing illegals (details here). During the pandemic, over 40% of the plant’s workers became infected with Covid-19, some of whom died; and in 2022, OSHA cited the plant “for failing to properly document worker injuries and illnesses 51 times in the span of two months” (see story here).
The company also has been cited for environmental violations (see, e.g., EPA press release here), and accused of worker and animal abuse (see details here).
And then, on January 9, 2023, police shot a worker dead on the production line (same link).
Chiewelthap Mariar, 26, was a Sudanese refugee who came to America seeking a better life. He’d found “hard and dirty” work at the Guymon plant, but that day his supervisor fired him. News stories don’t indicate what led up to it. But a worker who witnessed that day’s events claims HR told Mariar to finish his shift, so he continued working, but someone called police. The cops, seeing a company-issued band cutter in his hand, shot him dead.
The worker witness says he was fired, too, for recording the incident on his cellphone. He alleges other employees on the shop floor who witnessed the killing were told to keep working and “asked” to sign a falsified incident report, which the company denies.
This source says the cellphone video “provides an obscure view of the incident.” (Watch it It (here.) That source says it “appears to show officers aggressively speaking with Mariar as he moves around in an agitated manner. At one point officers quickly back up …. It isn’t clear what Mariar is doing with his hands ….” State police, in a press release (read it here), described Mariar as an “agitate [sic] and disgruntled employee,” and asserted he “produced a knife and began advancing on officers.”
People get fired from jobs all the time, and often are upset about being fired, especially when it happens in front of their co-workers. Managers are supposed to know how to handle this, without calling police, or someone getting shot dead.
