Race fight: 2 whites arrested in attack

The Daily Inter Lake

Two white Marion men were arrested on hate-crime charges Saturday evening after an attack on a migrant worker camp.

The migrants are of Asian descent. Information on their nationalities was not available Sunday.

More arrests are expected, the Flathead County Sheriff?s Office said.

Deputies arrested a 25-year-old man and a 26-year-old man ? one at a Marion bar and another at his home ? on suspicion of malicious intimidation or harassment relating to civil rights.

Montana law defines this offense as attacking a person or causing fear of being attacked based on the victim?s race, religion, national origin or participation in civil- or human-rights activities.

The incident began just before 8 p.m. at the Bitterroot Quick Stop on U.S. 2 in Marion.

Two white men in two pickups took a baseball bat and a tire iron out of the vehicles, and allegedly threatened some migrant mushroom pickers, using racial slurs, according to the Sheriff?s Office report.

One of the workers pulled a gun out of his vehicle and fired two shots in the air. Then the two parties went their separate ways.

Then shortly [later] at 10 p.m., the migrant workers were at a campground on West Moose Crossing in the Marion area when two pickups and a car pulled up. As many as seven white men got out, and allegedly hurled racial slurs and beer bottles at the migrants, the Sheriff?s Office reported. They then knocked down the migrants one by one, until the migrants began to fight back.

Others at the campground told deputies that the migrants did not provoke the attackers. One white man had a rifle and fired five or six shots in the air.

No one apparently was injured enough to require hospitalization.

The workers pick and sell mushrooms that grow in the aftermath of forest fires.