Quake Gives Dead Boy’s Writings a Cruel Irony

Just weeks before his death, Howard Lee wrote his own epitaph.

“If it weren’t for fate, I might be somewhere else,” the 14-year-old boy wrote in a nine-page autobiography titled “My Life.”

That sentence proved as cruelly ironic as anything connected with the merciless Northridge quake, which murdered Howard in his bed, a Golf Digest he had been reading the night before close at hand.

Rescuers who arrived at the Northridge Meadows Apartments after the quake could still hear Howard, a tall, always smiling boy who was thinking seriously of becoming a priest, calling out from the ruins of Apartment 101. Around him in the darkness, 15 other people were dying, including his father, Pil, who was trapped in the bathroom where he had been brushing his teeth before heading off to work as an RTD mechanic.

“Help me, help me,” Howard shouted. Or maybe it was Pil.

The rescuers kept telling the voices to hold on. But the building had shifted 10 feet to the north when it collapsed and they couldn’t locate them, even with the help of Howard’s mother, who had been pulled from the wreckage earlier. Finally, they found a pillow and showed it to Hyun Lee, who said, yes, that belonged to Howard, whom she affectionately called her “big son.”

Then they found Howard.

“This son is dead, ma’am,” said the firefighter. “He is dead.”

Hyun Lee, a deeply religious woman with a cascade of rich black hair, burst into tears, letting go of the thin thread of hope she’d held onto for four hours. “Can I see him?” she asked. Her husband’s body was the last recovered from the ruins of the single worst catastrophe connected with the killer quake.

If it weren’t for fate. The phrase sounds faintly glib and mocking now, cheapening everything that Pil Soon Lee was about. But there is no denying that the Lee family was star-crossed.

Pil Lee, known as James to his friends, was not a soft man. He had known hardship and been hurt by it, and he was a disciplinarian, the kind of man with a tendency to lecture his sons to get the best out of them. “Whenever he gave us speeches they were the best I ever heard,” said Jason, 12, Howard’s younger brother. Like his mother, he managed to escape the apartment and is now staying at the Chatsworth home of a fellow member of the Korean Catholic Center church. Jason’s feet, crushed in the collapse of the apartment building, are wrapped thickly with gauze and he has to crawl around the tile floor on his hands and knees because the family hasn’t been able to locate a wheelchair.

Howard’s autobiography, written for his ninth-grade reading class at Our Lady Queen of Angels Seminary, next to the San Fernando Mission, provides some of the best insight into this unlucky but determined and, to the end, extremely close family.

Pil Lee, it is clear, was always a hard worker. He won a college scholarship in Korea, then became a metallurgical engineer.

Hyun, a quiet girl who went to church every morning to celebrate the Eucharist, grew up in Inchon, helping to earn money for the family by mowing lawns and plowing fields. Then she became a nurse, a career she would pursue in the United States.

Howard took care of his parents’ romance in a couple of sentences. “My dad met my mom at a cafe,” he wrote. “They went on a couple of dates and found that they were meant for each other and got married.”

After hearing from other Korean emigres that the United States was a great place, Pil Lee decided to chuck everything and move his new wife across the sea. Though he was a skilled engineer, his first job in America was driving an ice cream truck. But Pil was a resolute man, and he changed jobs frequently, always moving up the ladder, even if only inch by inch.

Howard was born in 1979. “I was a rowdy child,” he said, though it’s hard to reconcile his self-portrait with the word picture of him painted by teachers and friends. They described him as a happy, friendly kid who could charm anyone with his wide smile. In fact, said Father Dick Martini of Our Lady Queen of Angels, he won a contest at the high school this year for coaxing the most magazine subscriptions out of his neighbors, and was proclaimed rector for a day. He loved basketball and playing golf with his father, but perhaps his greatest gift was his empathy for others.

The day Sister St. George lectured her students for coming to school unprepared, Howard was the only student to approach her after class.

“I’m sorry we weren’t prepared today,” he said. “We’ll do better next time.”

Jason was born two years after Howard.

Eventually, Pil Lee’s tireless work paid off and he had his own clothing store, selling Levis. Business was good. But then the store was robbed and the Lees, worried about the safety of their sons, sold the business.

With the money they had saved, the family purchased a big house with a swimming pool in the Valley. “Everything seemed to be going all right,” wrote Howard. The family invested some of their savings in a Chinese restaurant in North Hollywood.

That decision proved to be the first fateful wrong turn. The economy in Southern California hit the skids and the business began losing $5,000 a month. Friends loaned them money, but that only put off the inevitable.

“I had never seen my parents so tired in my entire life,” Howard wrote. “My mom even told me that it was so hard to try to keep the restaurant alive that she thought of ending her life. I tried to help the best I could but it seemed all that I did just got in other people’s way. I was worried about my family because it seemed to me that we were breaking up.”

Then they found grace.

“When my mom got home one night she started praying. My dad, my brother and I joined her. Pretty soon after that we started having a family prayer every night before we went to sleep. I truly think that the night prayers together with my family saved us.”

The Lees lost the restaurant, then their home. In 1993, they were forced to move into a small two-bedroom apartment in Northridge. Pil Lee, who had a job as a mechanic for the RTD, started thinking about getting an engineering degree in the United States. The family was no longer well off, but never again would they lose heart.

“I thank God that my family survived the whole ordeal,” Howard wrote.

“I know that some other families would have been separated or even hurt. All my family left with were a few emotional scars.”

The next fateful turn occurred last year when the family got lost and ended up in the driveway of Queen of Angels, a high school seminary, which is a kind of boarding school for young men thinking of going on to the priesthood. Howard had just graduated from grammar school and was unsure where he would go next. After some thought, he decided to enroll at Queen of Angels, though he was worried about leaving home.

“I finally stopped thinking of the problems I might have at the seminary, but the advantages. That’s why you find me attending your classes Mrs. Main. If it weren’t for fate, I might be somewhere else.”

And if it weren’t for fate, Howard Lee would not have been in his bed in the apartment Sunday night. Students normally live at the seminary from Sunday through Friday night. But because Monday was a holiday, the students had one extra day at home.

Hyun Lee said she wants to resume her old life as soon as she can, and as soon as her youngest son recovers from his injuries. A funeral mass for Pil and Howard Lee is scheduled today at St. Charles Church in North Hollywood, at which Cardinal Roger M. Mahony is scheduled to officiate, according to family and church officials.

Hyun Lee pondered over the reason why God would call her husband and son to him, because she has no doubt that he did.

God “really loves them,” explained Jason, translating his mother’s uncertain English. “And he wanted to stop their suffering.”

Many people wouldn’t be satisfied with that explanation. But then many people, as Howard pointed out, would have had their spirits crushed by other setbacks the family suffered.

Father Martini said that after the accident, Hyun Lee went to church and knelt at the altar. A priest saw her and approached hesitantly, unsure of himself and of what to say to this aggrieved woman. Suddenly, she saw him and, as though eager to relieve his momentary suffering, extended herself to him.

“Please, father, come and pray with me,” she said.