In the summer of 1960 in Monroe, Louisiana, a young, 19-year-old African American man named Ernest Lee McFarland worked a difficult job cleaning septic tanks for a white man, Robert Fuller, who owned a sanitation business. Fuller, who was 40 years old at the time and also went by the name Zennie William Fuller, had a reputation for mistreating and underpaying his employees.
By July of that year, Fuller was behind on wages for McFarland and four of his other young Black co-workers: Marshall Johnson, Charlie Willis, and brothers Albert and David Pitts.
On July 13, 1960, Fuller invited the five young men to his home with the promise of finally paying them the money they were owed. However, the gathering soon turned deadly. Fuller would later claim that the men were armed, which he said prompted him to retrieve his shotgun and open fire on the group. The gunfire was devastating, with four of the five workers being fatally wounded. A witness later reported to the FBI that after the initial shots, Fuller's son helped to 'finish off' the survivors by shooting them in the head with a pistol.
Marshall Johnson and the Pitts brothers died at the scene of the shooting. Ernest Lee McFarland and Charlie Willis were transported to a local hospital, but McFarland succumbed to his injuries the following day. Miraculously, Charlie Willis was the sole survivor of the bloody encounter. Despite the brutal reality of four young men losing their lives, Robert Fuller was only briefly held on an 'open charge' before being released on a $25,000 bond. He was never indicted for the killings. Years later, in 2007, the FBI reopened the investigation into the deaths under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, but the effort did not result in any charges being filed against Fuller or his son, leaving the case unresolved.
