Basque Justice:
An Eye for an Eye!

Did you ever wish that you just hadn’t asked that question when researching your ancestry?  Those elderly relatives sometimes know some scary secrets, as we learned when we were casually informed that our Basque grandfather had actually come to America expressly to commit a murder.  And he had succeeded!  While shocking and unknown to us, the murder had the full blessing of his Basque family in Spain.

Our family knew that our prosperous and highly respected grandfather, Fermin Alustiza, had worked briefly in Cuban sugar cane fields before arriving in Florida.  But when Fermin had told US immigration officials that his plan in coming to America was to meet his older brother, he had conveniently left out a significant detail:  his plan was to meet his older brother’s murderer!  It was a secret Fermin would take to his grave.

The story his children would be told decades later was that Fermin had arrived in San Francisco to meet his brother just after the devastating 1906 earthquake.  But weeks of fruitless searching, as the story went, had convinced Fermin that his brother was among the thousands of unidentified dead.  End of story...or so we thought.

A very different and perplexing story was told to us in 2010 by 90-year-old Felix Alustiza, Fermin's nephew, whose family had lived close to Fermin's in the Basque Country.  Felix laughed as he assured us that the real reason Fermin came to California was to avenge his brother's murder... and the circumstances of that murder Felix then shared with us for the first time.

In 1898, Fermin Alustiza's large family ran a productive ranch in Spain's Basque Country.  There they employed many local and itinerant men as ranch hands and to tend the crops. Fermin's beloved older brother strictly supervised the work crews, and he had no tolerance for troublemakers on his family's property.

Every evening, the large Alustiza family gathered around the dining table for dinner and for all matters of family discussion. During one such dinner, Fermin's older brother told the family that he had that day terminated a disgruntled ranch hand who had threatened violence.

Shortly after that dinner, Fermin's older brother was stabbed to death!  The murderer was identified by witnesses as the terminated employee, but the desperate criminal had managed to escape justice by leaving Spain on a ship bound for Cuba.

Meanwhile, teenaged Fermin planned his own justice.  He ventured out following the fugitive's trail from Spain to Cuba, then to Florida, Nevada, and finally to California.  Having learned that the murderer was in San Francisco, Fermin patiently awaited his best opportunity to strike...and that came in the form of the disastrous earthquake of 1906.

Felix told us how young Fermin had struggled many days in the devastated city, living on stale bread where he could find it and sleeping in burned-out buildings.  But when he located the fugitive--who had survived the quake only to face Fermin's wrath--Basque justice prevailed!  Avenging his brother's death, young Fermin added one more dead body to the earthquake statistics, leaving no clues behind and taking the secret to his grave a half-century later.

Epilogue:  Rather than punishing his vengeance, God rewarded Fermin's intense moral principles and hard work by blessing him with a truly devoted family.  The highly respected and proud patriarch sent all three of his children to Stanford University, while his land and business holdings in California brought Fermin considerable wealth through the end of his long life.

~ Lynda Alustiza