700 Attend Rites for Miner Slain on Picket Line
More than 700 United Mine Workers members, dressed in camouflage green to symbolize union solidarity, attended a funeral Friday for a coal miner who was shot on a picket line.
The miners packed a funeral home chapel to pay their respects to John McCoy, 42, a union miner from Premier who was shot Tuesday morning.
Many of the mourners, who arrived from Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia, wore camouflage green, which became a symbol of union militancy and solidarity during last year’s nine-month strike in three states against Pittston Coal Group.
McCoy’s death occurred in a union dispute with Regency Industries Inc. and a handful of other companies that work in southern West Virginia. McCoy was employed by a subsidiary of A. T. Massey Coal, the target of a bitter UMW strike in 1984 and 1985.
McCoy and two other miners were shot as they approached a picket site, and the assailants are still unknown, state police said. The other two victims were still in the hospital Friday, officials said.
McCoy’s body was taken to a remote cemetery seven miles outside of Welch for a formal UMW burial. At the site, fellow members placed sprigs of evergreen on the casket.
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