When Chol Soo Lee was 12, he left the only home he had ever known to move to San Francisco. He was born during the Korean War and his mother left South Korea to give them a better life. However, when he joined her, he found only misery.
Lee didn’t speak English and school became his nightmare. He was teased for being different and when he tried to explain himself he was frustrated by the language barrier. Once he was so full of pent-up anger that he kicked a director. Lee was sent to a juvenile detention center for battery. Instead of empathy, he found more antagonism at the California Youth Authority. Although no one could communicate with him in his mother tongue, a psychiatrist diagnosed him with schizophrenia.
He spent his teenage years hopping in and out of juvenile prisons. In 1973, the 21-year-old lived in a small apartment at 452 Broadway. In the evenings, he walked a few blocks over to the North Beach strip club district, where he worked as a barker, yelling at passers-by to lure them in for a dance and a drink. Lee would later say that it was there that he saw the gun that got him into so much trouble.
Curious – Lee said he had never held a gun before – he had asked a colleague if he could borrow his pistol. Lee took the gun home and accidentally discharged a live shell into the wall while messing around. Police arrived when someone called 911 about the shooting but left after Lee explained the mishap.
The next day, June 3, 1974, a Chinatown gang leader named Yip Yee Tak walked through the busy intersection of Pacific and Grant just before sunset. Someone approached the man, fired and shot him dead in the street. The suspect charged through the crowd toward Columbus, throwing the gun, a .38 revolver, onto Beckett Street. The police, recalling the incident with Lee the previous day, pounced on the young man and took him into custody. He was amazed to learn he was charged with first degree murder.
What happened next was one of San Francisco’s most egregious miscarriages of justice—and the birth of one of the city’s most complicated heroes.
—
From the outside, the suitcase looked open and closed. Several witnesses identified Lee as the man who saw him kill Tak, and detectives said Lee’s gun was ballistically equivalent to the gun fired in the fatal shooting. San Francisco police speculated that Lee had been hired by one of his own to murder Tak; It was rumored that Tak pocketed $10,000 he had raised under the guise of helping young gang members.
The three main witnesses who testified were white tourists. The arresting officer told the court that Lee was “Chinese.”
“Anyone with even a modicum of knowledge about Asian culture would find it very unreal,” Korean-American journalist KW Lee later commented.
The judge, jury, and district attorney were all white. Although there were likely dozens of witnesses in Chinatown that day, none wanted to testify for fear of retaliation from the local gangs. Lee was found guilty.
The verdict barely made a splash in mainstream news, but word began to spread in the Korean-American community that Lee had been wrongly convicted. Sacramento Union reporter KW Lee began investigating the case — and caught up with Chol Soo Lee to hear his side of the story. The men felt a sense of kinship, outsiders in a world that was so often hostile to them.
The stories exploded the case in the Asian American community and made Chol Soo Lee a symbol of the oppression faced by Asian immigrants. The revelations, recounted in the documentary Free Chol Soo Lee, were astounding: A witness, a guard at a juvenile facility while Lee was incarcerated there, recanted his unique identification after learning that he had known Lee as a boy , suggesting Mann had simply mistook the killer’s face for the Asian boy he knew.
Asian American and Pacific Islander students gather at one of the many court protests to fight for the freedom of Chol Soo Lee.
Courtesy of Ken Yamada/Unity Archive Project
Then the only physical evidence in the case fell through. The gun in Lee’s possession was no match for the murder weapon. The SFPD ballistics expert had made a mistake.
The Free Chol Soo Lee movement was underway. The Korean American churches became ground zero for fundraising and outreach. Activists set up stalls in markets and parks. One activist laughed as she recalled in the documentary that people kept coming thinking it was free food; Non-Koreans didn’t know what “Chol Soo Lee” meant.
In 1977 everything changed. In the prison yard of the Deuel Vocational Institution in Tracy, Lee and Aryan Brotherhood member Morrison Needham got into an argument. While scrambling frantically, Lee used a handcrafted knife to stab Needham. The man died, and Lee stood trial for the second time in his young life and was charged with murder. He was found guilty again – Lee claimed the murder was in self-defense – and, now guilty of two counts of murder, was sentenced to death. He was transferred to San Quentin’s death row.
But meanwhile, Lee’s first murder conviction was moving through appeals. In 1979, an appeals court overturned Lee’s original conviction. The celebration was short-lived. Despite compelling evidence that Lee was innocent, the San Francisco Attorney’s Office decided to press charges again. Lee was on trial again for murder.
The 1982 retrial lasted five weeks. It took the jury just two days of deliberation to come to a verdict: not guilty.
The courtroom, filled with Lee’s supporters, erupted in cheers and tears. Before being escorted out of the room, Lee was allowed to briefly address the gallery. “One truth in this case is that I am innocent,” he stated. “This fact has never been disputed, no matter how many witnesses cited it.”
TV news crews surround Chol Soo Lee after he was released from prison on March 28, 1983.
Courtesy of Grant Din
Although he had been acquitted on his first case, Lee was still guilty on his second. He returned to prison and awaited a decision on what would happen next.
“It all raised a complex moral question that still dominates the case: if Lee wasn’t convicted of the first murder and therefore wasn’t even in prison when the second murder took place, how responsible for what happened is later is the criminal justice system itself?” asked the Los Angeles Times.
“We have here a man that a religious person would say is God undergoing a series of metaphysical tests far beyond human capacity,” his attorney Tony Serra told the San Francisco Chronicle.
Prosecutors agreed to present a plea deal: Lee’s previous incarceration would count as time served if he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. He did and finally, after a decade, Chol Soo Lee was free.
—
Freedom wasn’t easy for a man who spent his entire adulthood in prison. He was an instant celebrity, bullied at parties and asked to give lectures. During a visit to Los Angeles shortly after his release, he gave the LA Times a melancholy, thoughtful interview. He said he would be sitting alone in his apartment, nervous about escaping and socializing.
Chol Soo Lee on the day of his release.
Courtesy of Grant Din
“I think freedom is more what you feel inside than what you experience,” he mused. “For me, I notice that more and more. So I ended up staying home, listening to the radio and falling asleep.”
Freedom was also full of temptations. In Free Chol Soo Lee, friends recall that drugs and alcohol became Lee’s constant companions, often supplied by acquaintances. He tried quitting a few jobs, and soon “it got worse and worse and I was back on the streets,” Lee wrote in his memoir. A friend said Lee pulled a knife on them while demanding money to cure his addiction. His loved ones, who had stood by him in legal battles for years, felt alienated from the man they once supported.
In 1990, Lee was sentenced to 18 months in prison for drug possession. When he was released, he joined the Chinatown gangs. “I became a disappointment,” Lee wrote, “and an embarrassment.”
He began to associate with Peter Chong, a Hong Kong crime boss sent by his syndicate to set up shop in San Francisco. However, Chong’s grip weakened, and a traitor in his midst told Lee he would pay him $25,000 to burn down Chong’s home in the Outer Sunset Lieutenant: Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow.) Lee drove to Lincoln and 47th and unloaded gas cans from his car. He threw fire accelerant all over the dark, empty house, and just as it caught fire, Lee slipped. He struggled to get back on his feet, full of gas. When he escaped from the burning house, he was on fire from head to toe. The burns covered 90% of his body and severely disfigured his face. It was punishment enough for the judiciary: Lee pleaded guilty to arson and was only given a suspended sentence.
Remarkably, Lee’s community didn’t falter. He was again invited to give public speeches, and for the first time he accepted the task. In speeches for the rest of his life, Lee took responsibility for his vacillations while denouncing the system that had denied him the ability to live a normal life. In a speech featured in Free Chol Soo Lee, Lee looks nervous as he addresses the crowd in front of him. “I feel like a little grain of sand,” he says, “just trying to fit into life.”
In 2014, Lee’s health began to fail irrevocably. A longtime friend who was interviewed for the documentary said it felt like Lee was ready to stop fighting. On December 2, 2014 he died of complications from a stomach illness. Lee was 62.
“He was a victim of people’s expectations,” one of his attorneys once said. “When he went to prison, he was basically a street thug. When he came out 10 years later, people expected him to be some kind of hero.
“He felt a deep responsibility to the people who had supported him and he felt a lot of guilt because he wasn’t what they wanted him to be. It just wasn’t possible.”
“Free Chol Soo Lee” airs Monday at 10 p.m. on KQED and is available to stream via the PBS app.
