24 April 1955. This angered the workers further which prompted them to set up human blockades at the bus depot, stopping the buses from leaving. Chief Minister David Marshall tried to plead their case with the company's management, but his efforts were futile. On 12 May 1955, multilateral talks to mediate the workers' disputes were hampered as police clashed with strikers. The clash involved an estimated 2,000 people which broke out in the streets of Alexandra Road and Tiong Bahru. The police tried to break up the 2,000 students and strikers using tear gas. Four people died as a result, including Andrew Teo, a Constable with the Volunteer Special Constabulary, who was severely beaten by a mob, Yuen Yau Phang, another Chinese police officer who was allegedly burned to death in his car, Gene D. Symonds, an American press correspondent also beaten by the mob and Chong Lon Chong, a sixteen-year-old student of Chin Kang School whose death caught the most attention. In an initial Straits Times report, the student was shot one mile away from a hospital, but was paraded around for two and half-hours by the students to further arouse the crowd's emotion without sending him for medical treatment. The press, including the vernacular press and the English medium Straits Times, however later reported that it was revealed that the coroner stated in the lawyer's brief to Chong's mother that it was inconclusive as to whether the boy was dead or still alive after he was shot. Furthermore, it was also established after the trial that the four men who were arrested were not students. The riot resulted in the death of four people and thirty-one people injured. Significance While the Hock Lee incident has conventionally been portrayed be one of communist subversion, other sources suggest that the students and workers' involvements in the Hock Lee incident were also due to anxieties felt by these two groups as a result of the conditions of colonial society. The Hock Lee bus workers' strikes can also be seen as one of the catalysts for the modernisation of the bus transportation industry in Singapore. The Hock Lee workers' strikes as well as other similar transportation workers' strikes resulted in the nationalisation of the Singapore transportation industry, specifically the Chinese owned bus companies. Shortly after the Hock Lee workers' strikes, the Singapore Traction Company strikes occurred which motivated the Hawkins Report of