When Chol Soo Lee was 12 years old, he left the only home he’d ever known to move to San Francisco. He was born during the Korean War, and his mother left South Korea to find them a better life. When he joined her, though, he found only misery.
Lee spoke no English, and school became his nightmare. He was picked on for being different and, when he tried to explain himself, he was consumed by frustration at the language barrier. Once, he was so filled with pent-up rage, he kicked a principal. Lee was sent to a juvenile detention facility for battery. Instead of empathy, he found more antagonism at the California Youth Authority. Although no one could communicate with him in his native language, a psychiatrist diagnosed him with schizophrenia.
He spent his teenage years bouncing in and out of youth prisons. In 1973, the 21-year-old found himself living in a small apartment at 452 Broadway. In the evenings, he walked a few blocks over to North Beach’s strip club district, where he worked as a barker, shouting out to passersby to entice them inside for a dance and a drink. Lee would later say that was where he saw the gun that got him in so much trouble.
Curious — Lee said he’d never held a gun before — he’d asked a co-worker if he could borrow his pistol. Lee took the gun home and, while playing around with it, accidentally discharged a live round into the wall. Police came when someone called 911 about shots fired, but left after Lee explained the mishap.
The next day, June 3, 1974, a Chinatown gang leader named Yip Yee Tak was walking through the busy intersection of Pacific and Grant shortly before sunset. Someone approached the man and fired, shooting him dead in the street. The suspect raced through the crowds and toward Columbus, dumping the gun, a .38 revolver, on Beckett Street as he went. Recalling the incident with Lee the day before, police descended on the young man and took him into custody. He was astonished to learn he was being 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.
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From the outside, the case looked open and shut. Multiple witnesses identified Lee as the man seen killing Tak, and detectives said Lee’s gun was a ballistics match to the one fired in the deadly shooting. San Francisco police speculated that Lee had been hired to assassinate Tak by one of his own; rumors were going around that Tak pocketed $10,000 he’d raised under the guise of helping young gang members.
The three primary witnesses who testified were white tourists. The arresting officer said in court that Lee was “Chinese.”
“Anyone who has a smattering of understanding of Asian culture would find it very unreal,” Korean American journalist K.W. Lee would later comment.
The judge, jury and district attorney were all white. Although there were likely dozens of witnesses in Chinatown that day, no one wanted to testify for fear of retaliation by the local gangs. Lee was found guilty.
The verdict barely made a ripple in mainstream news, but word was starting to circulate in the Korean American community that Lee had been wrongfully convicted. Sacramento Union reporter K.W. Lee began investigating the case — and met with Chol Soo Lee to hear his side of the story. The men felt a sense of kinship, outsiders in a world so often hostile to them.
The stories exploded the case in the Asian American community, turning Chol Soo Lee into a symbol of the oppression faced by Asian immigrants. The revelations, recounted in the documentary “Free Chol Soo Lee,” were astonishing: One witness, a guard at a juvenile facility during the time Lee was incarcerated there, recanted his positive identification after he learned he knew Lee as a boy, suggesting the man had simply mixed up the killer’s face with the Asian boy he knew.
Asian American and Pacific Islander students rally at one of many courthouse protests to fight for Chol Soo Lee’s freedom.
Courtesy of Ken Yamada/Unity Archive ProjectThen, the only physical evidence in the case fell through. The gun in Lee’s possession wasn’t a match for the murder weapon. The SFPD ballistics expert had made a mistake.
The “Free Chol Soo Lee” movement was underway. Korean American churches became ground zero for fundraising and outreach. Activists set up booths at markets and parks. One activist laughed as she recalled in the documentary that people kept coming up thinking it was free food; non-Korean speakers didn’t know what “Chol Soo Lee” meant.
In 1977, everything changed. While out on the prison yard at Deuel Vocational Institution in Tracy, Lee and Aryan Brotherhood member Morrison Needham got into a fight. While desperately scrapping, Lee used a handmade knife to stab Needham. The man died, and Lee was back in court facing murder charges for the second time in his young life. He was found guilty again — Lee claimed the killing was in self defense — and, now twice guilty of murder, sentenced to death. He was moved to San Quentin’s death row.
But all the while, 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 District Attorney’s Office decided to refile charges. Lee was back on trial for murder.
The 1982 retrial lasted five weeks. It took the jury just two days of deliberation to return a verdict: not guilty.
The courtroom, filled with Lee’s supporters, erupted into cheers and tears. Before being escorted out of the room, Lee was allowed to briefly address the gallery. “One truth of this case is I am innocent,” he declared. “That fact has never been disputed, no matter how many witnesses they put on.”
TV news crews surround Chol Soo Lee after he is released from prison on March 28, 1983.
Courtesy of Grant DinAlthough he’d been cleared in his first case, Lee was still guilty in his second. He returned to prison, awaiting a decision on what would happen next.
“It all raised a complex legal-moral question that still dominates the case: If Lee should not have been convicted in the first murder and, therefore, shouldn’t even have been in prison when the second killing occurred, how responsible for what happened later is the criminal justice system itself?” the Los Angeles Times asked.
“We have a man here that a religious person would say God is putting through a series of metaphysical tests that are way beyond the capacity of a person to bear,” his attorney Tony Serra told the San Francisco Chronicle.
Prosecutors agreed to put forward 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.
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Freedom was not easy for a man who had spent his entire adulthood in prison. He was an instant celebrity, mobbed at parties and asked to do speaking engagements. On a visit to Los Angeles shortly after his release, he gave a melancholy, contemplative interview to the LA Times. He said he’d sit alone in his apartment, feeling antsy to escape and socialize.
Chol Soo Lee on the day of his release.
Courtesy of Grant Din“I guess freedom is what you feel within yourself rather than what you’re experiencing,” he mused. “For me, I’m starting to realize that more and more strongly. So, in the end, I stayed home, listened to the radio and fell asleep.”
Freedom was also filled with temptation. In “Free Chol Soo Lee,” friends recall that drugs and alcohol became Lee’s constant companions, often supplied by acquaintances. He tried and quit a few jobs, and soon “it got worse and worse, and I was back on the streets,” Lee wrote in his memoir. One friend said Lee pulled a knife on them while demanding money to feed his addictions. His loved ones, who had stood by him through years of legal battles, felt alienated from the man they once supported.
In 1990, Lee was sentenced to 18 months for drug possession. When he was released, he fell in with Chinatown’s gangs. “I became a disappointment,” Lee wrote, “and a disgrace.”
He began associating with Peter Chong, a Hong Kong crime boss sent by his syndicate to make inroads in San Francisco. Chong’s grip was weakening, though, and a traitor in his midst told Lee he’d pay him $25,000 to burn down Chong’s house in the Outer Sunset (As an interesting San Francisco history aside, Chong would later be undone partly by testimony from a once-loyal lieutenant: Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow.) Lee drove to Lincoln and 47th and unloaded gas cans from his car. He dumped accelerant all over the dark, empty house and, just as it caught fire, Lee slipped. He struggled to regain his footing, covered in gasoline. By the time he escaped the burning home, he was on fire from head to toe. The burns covered 90% of his body and badly disfigured his face. It was punishment enough for the justice system: Lee pleaded guilty to arson charges and was sentenced only to probation.
Remarkably, Lee’s community didn’t falter. He was invited anew to give public speeches and, for the first time, he embraced the task. In speeches for the rest of his life, Lee took accountability for his wobbles while decrying the system that had robbed him of the opportunity to live any kind of normal life. In one speech shown in “Free Chol Soo Lee,” Lee looks nervous as he addresses the crowd before him. “I feel like a little bit of a grain of sand,” he says, “just trying to mix in into life.”
In 2014, Lee’s health began to irrevocably fail. A longtime friend interviewed for the documentary said it felt like Lee was ready to stop fighting. On Dec. 2, 2014, he died of complications from a gastric disorder. 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 he would be some kind of hero.
“He felt deeply responsible to the people who had supported him, and he felt very guilty for not being what they wanted him to be. It just wasn’t possible.”
“Free Chol Soo Lee” airs on KQED at 10 p.m. Monday and is available to stream on the PBS app.
