Half Moon Bay Tragedy Exposes Horrific Conditions Farm Workers Endure

HALF MOON BAY, CA — Something about Janelle Magnusson’s local Safeway didn’t add up.

The sight of large pallets of water bottles stacked high in front of the store probably wouldn’t have captured her attention in Phoenix or Las Vegas. But in a community that rarely sees temperatures get much past the low 70s, she wondered.

“They always have tons of bottled water out front,” the Half Moon Bay resident said.

Recent events helped her figure it out.

A mass shooting Monday left seven people dead — five men and two women — and one critically injured at the hands of a disgruntled farm worker, according to the San Mateo County Sheriff's Office.

Chunli Zhao, 67, of Half Moon Bay, has been identified as the suspect in the Half Moon Bay shooting. He is scheduled to be arraigned Wednesday.

“It’s because of the farmers, a lot of them don’t have running water,” said Magnusson, a psychotherapist who has lived in the area for 10 years.

This tightly-knit coastal community of around 11,000, about 30 miles south of San Francisco, known to the world mostly for giant pumpkin contests and one of the world's most prolific surfing competitions, was reeling before the shooting after a series of powerful storms caused widespread damage and shuttered a major artery.

The mass shooting – among three within a 48-hour-period that killed 19 people in the Golden State – has shed light on a community of immigrant farm workers, including many from Asia, of which little is known.

The shootings, which occurred at Mountain Mushroom Farm at 12761 San Mateo Road (Highway 92) and the Concord Farms at 2125 Cabrillo Highway South (Highway 1), have revealed cultural differences so stark, this uniquely American experience itself appears to have initially been lost in translation.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, who appeared at a press conference in Half Moon Bay Tuesday afternoon, said “their translator didn’t even know how to translate these words.”

“When the gunfire occurred, they were witnesses, their friends got shot, killed. They went over to people who had been shot, and they thought they were acting. They’d never heard a sound like that, they’d never seen a scene like that. They didn’t even know how to comprehend a gunshot wound.”

“Only in America do we see this kind of carnage, this kind of destruction of communities.”

The cultural and language barriers figure to present challenges to investigators, Sheriff Christina Corpus acknowledged.

"It's very important for us to have our deputies represent the communities that we serve," Corpus said.

"We do have deputies that speak the different languages, we have deputies that speak Mandarin, Cantonese and Spanish, but there's always challenges when you're dealing with a multi-complex, with different crime scenes.

"We've never had one of these (mass) shootings before."

Some of the farm workers have been relocated and will receive pay, San Mateo County officials said.

Many of the farmers have been paid salaries below minimum wage and were living in squalor. During the storms, some were picking strawberries in fields “with water up to their knees,” Newsom said.

“Some of you should see where these folks are living, the conditions they’re in,” Newsom said.

“They’re living in shipping containers. Shipping containers.”

Accounts of the living conditions farmers endured have been a revelation to many.

“We don’t see that,” Magnusson said.

“We’re very sheltered from that. We see the beautiful, right? But we’re not seeing how these people live day to day.”

Sue Holland, the Pastor at Half Moon Bay’s Coastside Lutheran Church, acknowledged that before the shooting, she was not aware many of the immigrant farm workers are of Asian descent.

“This community that seems to be living underground, they may not have been connected to a lot of the services that are available,” Holland said.

“We need to do a better job of reaching out so that all the different communities within the community are connected.”

Half Moon Bay Vice Mayor Joaquin Jiménez said that in the aftermath of this tragedy, the community’s farm workers will no longer be unseen.

“Many of you come to the community for the pumpkins and ignore the farmworkers,” Jiménez said.

“Not today. We're not going to ignore anybody. We're going to support each other."