Shawn Sherwin LaBeet, is the half-brother of a notorious mass murderer and fugitive from justice, Ishmael LaBeet, who was implicated in eight slayings at a St. Croix resort in 1973, a crime known in the Virgin Islands as the Fountain Valley Massacre.
In 1972 when Ishmael LaBeet and four associates killed eight people at a St. Croix resort, Carambola. The five — all dressed in fatigues — sprang out of the bushes at the Rockefeller-owned Fountain Valley golf course in St. Croix and sprayed the dining area with bullets.
In the 1972 massacre, the attackers rounded up 15 people, four Miami residents were among them. Eight were ordered to kneel in a circle and systematically shot to death with a shotgun and .45-caliber and 9mm pistols. The four from Miami, two couples vacationing together, were among the dead.
The five black robbers, who had screamed racial, anti-white insults during the massacre, according to witnesses, then fled with $731 from the cash register and the personal effects of the dead.
Thirteen years later, on New Year’s Eve, 1985, Ishmael LaBeet (Shawn Sherwin LaBeet’s half-brother) overpowered guards from the Virgin Islands Department of Corrections who were escorting him on a flight from St. Croix to New York.
Ishmael LaBeet forced the American Airlines flight with 198 people aboard to divert to Havana, Cuba, where he was taken off the plane by Cuban authorities. The plane later made the flight to New York with the rest of the passengers.
Ishmael LaBeet remains a fugitive, and his crime still resonates with locals to this day.