(Seguin) – See how Seguin played a role in the aftermath of what was until now a very untold story of tension and violence along the fishing communities on the Texas Gulf Coast.
Adding to that tension was the murder of local crabber Billy Joe Aplin in Seadrift just west of Port O’ Connor.
The circumstances surrounding his death on Aug. 3, 1979, and the decision to move his trial 126 miles to Seguin’s Guadalupe County Courthouse are all now part of a documentary titled “Seadrift.” A showing of that documentary by Tim Tsai was originally set to take place in Seguin but was canceled due to the COVID pandemic in 2020. This Sunday, that film is slated to hit the big screen at The Palace Theater as part of The Lost River Film Festival and Seguin Pecan Heritage Days.
Helping to promote the film is Aplin’s daughter Beth Aplin Martin. Martin says her father’s death resulted from tension brought upon the fall of Saigon, the capital of Vietnam, in 1975 and the influx of Vietnamese refugees that consumed the area and whose presence was a threat to the Seadrift (mostly white) fisherman when the refugees too began fishing.
A casualty of that heated history was her father, 34-year-old Aplin, who was shot in the back.
In hopes of receiving a fair trial, the court hearing was moved to Seguin. The suspects included 21-year-old Sau Van Nguyen and his brother, 20-year-old Chihn Van Nguyen. Both were later acquitted by State District Judge Clarence Stevenson of Victoria after the jury believed both men were acting on self-defense.
In the documentary, Martin shares a terrifying incident on the water where her entire family was approached by five boats carrying two to three Vietnamese each – some of them wielding machetes and attempting to jump into their craft. After minutes of them threatening her dad that they were going to kill his wife and kids while he watched, she says her dad was able to ram his boat through two of the boats and get his family to safety. She says this horrible memory from the age of 14 is when she realized how violent her community was growing.
She says soon after that incident; her father decided never to go out crabbing again and spent that next month preparing his shrimp boat. Soon after, her father went into town and never returned home.
“From what I understand is that he saw Sau Van Nguyen down at the docks with a new boat and got out and initiated a confrontation angry over what had happened and increasingly, it sort of turned him. I could only imagine having his family threatened like that and having to just change completely what he was fixing to do (crabbing to shrimping), had just bought a new house and all that. He had always handled like most people that I knew, at that time, handled things with his fist and he got out and proceeded to initiate a confrontation over it and Sau Van was able to get away at one point. He went home and got a gun and was back within a few minutes and shot and killed him,” recalls Martin.
While working with Tsai to piece together the documentary, Martin admits to uncovering many surprises along the way – one of which was difficult to accept.
“One of the things though that probably, well not probably, I know that it made it worse was that the KKK that I came to find out later as an adult was that the KKK were there in Seadrift really drumming up and exploiting more of those tensions and some folks about six of them contacted me after. My dad joined as well. that I didn’t learn until 2018 and I believe one of his brothers. That just made it even worse. However, I would say that I had never received reports that dad – through all my looking, I didn’t find anything indicated that he was committing any sort of violent acts prior to an incident that happened at the bay which is when I became aware of issues,” said Martin.
As Martin mentioned, the Ku Klux Klan spent the following time after the verdict here in Seguin making things even worse in the coastal community. This is an aspect that folks will find in the documentary. It will show how this impact involving the Asian community also became a vital game changer in the movement of civil rights in this country.
That’s because this terror campaign against all Vietnamese along the Texas Gulf Coast led to a landmark civil rights case taken up by the SPLC (The Southern Poverty Law Center) in 1981 on behalf of the Vietnamese fisherman. The case came before Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, “the first African-American appointed to the federal bench in Texas and only the third African-American woman to be appointed a federal judge in the United States.”
The SPLC won its case, and the KKK’s violence against the Vietnamese ended.
Although a bit hesitant to be a part of the documentary, Martin says this tragedy surrounding her father has become a difficult life lesson. Yet, today, she says she has found peace with it all. Plus, she says it’s another point of history that we all need to know about to inform our future progress.
“One other thing about Sau Van – you know just the deeper struggles with that. He was a child solider. He’s the man who killed dad and part of why I distance myself so much from it is I felt a lot of guilt for having sympathy for his situation where he came from – you know the man who killed my dad and I had to come to a point in my life where I realized that both of those were just going to have to exist at the same time – even all those men out on the boat that day, there was no justice for what they did. I still have great deal of sympathy for all that they suffered to be able to even get to the United States,” said Martin.
The Seadrift Film premiered in 2019 and has since won numerous awards including the Best Historical Film Award at the Dallas International Film Festival that same year.
The film will be the last on the schedule for the Lost River Film Festival being held Saturday and Sunday. Showtime is at 7:30 p.m. Sunday at The Palace.