A wailing wall

On the morning of June 16, 1972, when I read in the San Francisco Chronicle that a young man named Richard Lee had been positively identified as the main suspect in the slaying of another young man, Poole Leong, I did not imagine for a moment that my brother was that suspect. I paused at the coincidence, but with scores of Richard Lees listed in the phone book, I was unconcerned and didn't even call my parents to double-check. I flipped to the Doonesbury comic strip.

The author and his mother: "As if beseeching a god that had broken a promise to her that day, she banged her head against the marble, her private wailing wall."

As a junior at Cal enjoying the trajectory of my rich student life and urban design aspirations, I had somehow compartmentalized Chinatown as the past. I muffled the alarm bells that must have been clanging inside as the media reported an alarming number of sensational murders in and around Chinatown. Police sources blamed a Chinese youth-gang war. Yet no one asked exactly what they were fighting about or whether the political power struggle and gambling racket/police- pay-off-system might be a cause. I was living large in Berkeley—my time, my life. I didn't want anything to put the brakes on it, to force me to "slip back." I wasn't consciously aware of this filter, but in effect, I was long gone from Chinatown.

And then my brother Richard Lee was arrested and charged with the murder of Poole Leong.

Stunned, I clutched my one sure connection, Richard, and hoped that, like Ariadne's cord, he could navigate me safely through the labyrinthine puzzle of a now unimaginable community to uncover the facts and ultimately to prove his innocence, if innocent he were.

That meant reacquainting myself with Richard in, of all places, the city jail. The young adult facing me through the thick Plexiglas window seemed distracted, lost, and disheveled in his prison-issued jumpsuit. His two dark eyes glowered at me, as if stripping away all notions of civility.

He seemed a stranger and yet we had grown up together as close as two brothers can. We had run together as street urchins—roaming Telegraph Hill and munching its wild raspberries, measuring our child's hands against the fangs of great white sharks on display at Fisherman's Wharf, and bicycling the length of Golden Gate Park to Ocean Beach. We had organized a rag-tag Boy Scout troop in our apartment building because none of us could afford to join an official troop. Later, as teenagers, we weremainstays in the youth ministry of a pioneering evangelical church, speaking in tongues and preaching the gospel until we left. But as brothers are wont to do, we drifted steadily apart as we grew older. The truth was that I wasn't sure I really knew this grown-up Richard.

Still, he reassured me of his innocence, urging me to talk to his lawyer, James Martin McGuiness, instead. This was comforting news, for McGuiness was one of the city's finest lawyers. If anyone could, surely James Martin McGuiness would rectify this nightmarish mistake.

McGuiness's young associate and a recent law school graduate, Patrick Coyle, was of the view that Richard should never have been charged for Poole Leong's murder. He had an alibi and the sole eyewitness evidence was weak at best. Coyle was confident he could preclude prejudicial and sensational gang innuendo. Besides, Richard didn't fit the profile: He showed up to work every day in a bustling city hall bank branch serving cops, judges, and reporters until his arrest. He was entering San Francisco State University on scholarship in the fall. Clearly a case of mistaken identity.

At summer's end, Richard was still in jail. He lost his bank job and his scholarship. As the November trial date approached, Coyle informed me that, given the weak case, the firm had decided that Coyle could proceed to trial and expected that the trial judge would dismiss the case for insufficient evidence.

My parents and I attended the five-day trial until the verdict was rendered on November 1, 1972. Except for watching Perry Mason on television, we had no experience with the court system. We simply assumed that the police would arrest the real killer at the last minute, and that—tah-dahhh!—with a magician's flourish, Richard would be absolved and justice served.

As I watched this trial, however, a dense, sinking feeling pressed me farther back into the rigid, hard wooden bench of the spectators' section. I recognized the vampires of anti-Chinese racism past rising from their coffins, gathering around for a blood feast, impatient to gorge themselves on the energy of someone at the prime of his vitality, as if the national civil rights movement were only a TV drama and as if we had never marched on Grant Avenue three years earlier, jump-starting our own stalled march for full citizenship.

And that's how it went down.

Non-white jurors were dismissed. The judge wouldn't allow the racial attitudes of the all-white jury to be probed. An uncertain teenage girl eyewitness had to be prodded hard by the prosecutor into identifying Richard with an uncertain and barely audible "I guess so." In last minute surprise testimony, a cell-mate testified that Richard had confessed to him and that, no, he himself had been offered no deals in exchange for testimony.

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