In Concord, a push to reopen 1985 case of young Black man found hanging from a tree at BART station

CONCORD — Tragedy shook the Bay Area in 1985 after the body of a young Black man from Berkeley was discovered hanging from a fig tree near the Concord BART station — news that reverberated across Northern California and made national headlines.

Timothy Charles Lee, a 23-year-old fashion design student and gay man, had fallen asleep on the train after work on Nov. 1, a Friday, in San Francisco. He awoke in Concord, which at that time was the end of the BART line, and called family and friends from a nearby payphone, trying to secure a ride home.

Roughly 11 hours later, Lee was found hanging in the tree in a vacant dirt lot off Mt. Diablo Street.

Local law enforcement quickly closed the case, deeming Lee’s death a suicide. Police said a suicide note was found nearby, and no evidence of a physical struggle had been recorded in Lee’s autopsy report, which also noted that his blood alcohol level was .13, just above the legal driving limit in the 1980s.

But nearly four decades later, the finding in Lee’s death still doesn’t add up for his family and local community leaders, who are skeptical that the young San Francisco College of the Arts student would impulsively commit suicide that night. Instead, they said they believe he may have been lynched, citing odd details in the case that did not make sense, including that Lee’s name was misspelled, as were those of his siblings, in the alleged suicide note.

On Thursday, the 38th anniversary of the day Lee’s body was found, a few dozen people marched through downtown Concord, handing out informational fliers to passersby before setting up an altar and candlelight vigil in Lee’s memory near the vacant BART parking lot.

Frank Sterling, Lee’s cousin and a local journalist, said they hope to petition California Attorney General Rob Bonta — or another independent agency — to reopen the investigation into Lee’s death, which he believes was a racist and anti-gay attack.

“This case has laid dormant and quiet for too long, but I want to hold people accountable,” Sterling said. “That’s why I’m here — I want to find out what happened to my cousin.”

According to a 415-page FBI file that compiled accounts and investigations into what happened that November night, two men wearing white Ku Klux Klan robes were arrested — 12 hours before Lee’s body was found — after stabbing two young black men in the parking lot of a Concord bar located only a few miles away from the city’s BART station.

While then-Concord Police Chief George Straka described it as “an individual act” by “a couple of jerks,” Klan literature found in their pockets when they were arrested bolstered theories that Lee might have been murdered.

Within 24 hours, Concord police had destroyed the 16-inch ligature that strangled Lee, rather than preserve it as evidence — which they claimed was in line with internal policies regarding suicides at the time. Lee was also embalmed before his family could conduct a second independent autopsy, despite efforts to delay the burial.

At least two neighbors living near the BART station reported hearing screams and the sound of people running hours before Lee was found.

After ending up in Concord, Lee called his roommate and other acquaintances from a payphone but assured them that he’d somehow find a way home — about 25 miles to Berkeley — according to a timetable of Lee’s last 24 hours compiled by the Contra Costa Times in 1986 through written statements and interviews. Lee also told colleagues after work on the day before his death that he’d see them when he returned to work the next week.

The Emeryville and Oakland branches of the NAACP decried what they felt was a lackluster investigation by local law enforcement. But many Concord city officials were frustrated by the NAACP’s allegations about KKK activity in the county, which they said they could neither deny nor verify at the time.

The Concord police chief, a Contra Costa County crisis coordinator and the county coroner all had “no doubts” that Lee hung himself in the vacant dirt lot that night, according to news accounts at the time. In addition to autopsy reports that determined there were no physical signs of a struggle or that Lee was forcibly hanged, a county official reviewing the case said Lee was “in the critical age group” for suicide and may have exacerbated depressed feelings after drinking alcohol earlier that night, especially while stranded late at night in an unfamiliar, largely white and working class city.

Mounting local pressure eventually got the FBI involved by January 1986, looking into whether there was probable cause to warrant a federal investigation into the allegations of civil rights violations. However, the FBI’s investigation wrapped by May without any new conclusions.

Nearly 40 years later, scores of pedestrians in Concord’s downtown were learning about Lee’s case for the first time — thanks to leaflets passed out by marchers on Thursday.

Tameyah Slocum said she was on the verge of bursting into tears after reading the flier. Reflecting on the lack of evidence police reported, the 23-year-old Bay Area resident who has a degree in psychology and works as a registered behavior technician in underserved Bay Area schools, pointed to other cases of suspicious deaths in recent years that have been swept under the rug because they involved alcohol or young, marginalized people of color.

“We’ve seen this happen time and time again, so you can’t expect me to sit here and believe that (he committed suicide) just because it’s believable for a lot of other people, ” Slocum said. “The fact that that was the only narrative being pushed (in Lee’s case) is heartbreaking. How many more times are we going to just let that fly?”

None of the Concord City Council members attended Thursday’s march, despite invitations from organizers, but Richmond Councilmember Melvin Willis and Antioch Mayor Lamar Thorpe joined other protesters at the Concord BART Station.

For Thorpe, the unanswered questions about police conduct and racism in Concord in 1985 are reminiscent of ongoing issues within the ranks of Antioch’s law enforcement, which has been embroiled in controversy after texts from officers were discovered that discussed falsifying evidence and beating up suspects, as well as racist and homophobic remarks.

“What’s the harm about looking back at the facts to ensure that no stone is left unturned?” Thorpe said, standing near the tree where Lee was found. “As I hear history about eastern Contra Costa County, the Antioch of today was Concord in the 1980s. It shouldn’t take things like this (march), racist text messages or even people being arrested by the FBI to make the kinds of changes that we need to weed out racism.”