Youth Wanted in Brawl Vanishes With Family : Missing: The Lees have apparently fled their expensive Westlake Village compound, and, possibly, the United States.

The four large dogs that once guarded the $1-million compound are gone. The phones are disconnected. And the two Mercedes-Benzes have not been seen on the Lee family’s curving driveway for weeks.

With 16-year-old James Lee set to stand trial for his role in a violent, race-tinged brawl, his entire family has apparently fled Westlake Village and, possibly, the country.

“I don’t know where he is,” said John Vanarelli, the deputy district attorney handling the case. “All I know is he’s gone. He could be sitting up in Ojai, for all I know.”

But Vanarelli and other authorities suspect the worst: that Lee and his family have returned to their native Taiwan, a country that has no diplomatic relations with the United States and no extradition treaty.

“If they are in Taiwan, even if we know they are there, there’s almost no chance of us extraditing them from that country,” Vanarelli said. “Especially when all we’ve got on James is that he whacked some guy with a stick. If he shot the President, maybe.”

Of course, to the Thousand Oaks community, the charges against James Lee represent far more than whacking some guy with a stick.

On his 16th birthday, Lee allegedly climbed into a car with other Asian youths and drove to North Ranch Park intent on humiliating a white football player who had beaten him, police say.

“We are the Asian mafia,” the students reportedly announced as they piled out of five cars with baseball bats, two-by-fours and guns. The chaotic fight that day in February left two football players hospitalized with gunshot wounds and four Asian youths facing criminal charges.

What’s more, the incident left the Thousand Oaks community facing the uneasy truth that violence and gang activity had crept into their most exclusive neighborhoods.

One angry resident lashed out at the Lee family. “Take your criminal family and your criminal son James and go back to Taiwan with your Asian gangs where you all belong,” read an anonymous note that came to Lee’s father, his lawyer said.

The racial hatred bothered the Lees, said their pastor, Curtis Lowe. But the family seemed most distressed about the future of their youngest son. Barely able to speak the language, the Lees had no understanding of the justice system that kept their child in custody for six weeks after the fight and threatened to send him to jail for four years on assault charges, Lowe said.

Still, when he visited the family home in April, Lowe had no idea they would vanish by the end of the month.

“We’ve tried to figure out why he fled,” said Lowe, a pastor at the Chinese Christian Church in Thousand Oaks. “I think that they wanted to stay here. And they wanted a life for their children here.

“I can’t figure out why someone would leave so much.”

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The Lees arrival in Westlake Village was as quiet as their departure.

In August, 1989, they paid $1.1 million for a Spanish-style home and three-acre estate on Oak Grove Place, a tree-lined cul-de-sac.

Neighbors do not remember seeing any moving vans, just trucks from furniture stores delivering new merchandise for the six-bedroom house.

That month, Hsin-E Lee registered two new Mercedes-Benz cars and a Dodge van with the state Department of Motor Vehicles. The Mercedeses, with license plate numbers just seven digits apart, were apparently purchased on the same day.

Lee set out to protect his domain, installing a metal fence around the estate and buying four large dogs--a Rottweiler, two German shepherds and a Tibetan mastiff. He spent more than $60,000 on landscaping, installing a run for his dogs as well as trees and flowers around the estate.

“I can see where the parents maybe got him out of the country, but they’ve got to come back,” said Jan Fekkes, a Thousand Oaks contractor who did much of the landscaping work. “You just don’t leave a house like that.”

But that seems to be just what the Lees have done.

Neighbors suddenly noticed that the dogs were no longer roaming around the yard. The cars, likewise, are no longer driving up and down the cul-de-sac. One neighbor said the mail carrier had been instructed to put the family’s mail on hold for five months.

“I figured they probably fled,” said a neighbor, who asked not to be identified. “Everybody knew they would.”

Apparently court officials didn’t. A Superior Court judge set a $5,000 bail for James Lee at a March 23 hearing.

Prosecutor Vanarelli had argued for a $20,000 to $50,000 bond because of the nature of the offense and the fact that James’ brother, Frank, had been missing ever since the Feb. 3 fight.

Frank Lee reportedly threw the first punch in the fight and helped recruit the Asian youths for the melee. Police waited outside the Lee house to pick him up after the fight, but he never appeared.

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Vanarelli raised that issue in arguing for a higher bond for James Lee.

“Even if I had gotten what I wanted, I don’t think that would have kept him from leaving,” Vanarelli said last week.

As it turned out, Hsin-E Lee paid the $5,000 bond and brought James home. The family appeared at an April 6 preliminary hearing, but did not show up for an April 27 arraignment. When James did not appear at a makeup hearing on April 29, the judge raised the bond to $100,000 and issued a warrant for his arrest.

Local authorities so far have made only cursory attempts to find him.

With no evidence that James is at home, police have no probable cause to search the house, said Ventura County Sheriff’s Detective Ernest Montagna. Instead, officers routinely stop by the Oak Grove address to check for any activity.

“This is an estate with gates,” Montagna said. “The best thing you can do is use the call box and hope someone answers.”

Crimestoppers of Thousand Oaks has offered a $1,000 reward for any tips on James Lee’s whereabouts. But Montagna said he hasn’t had much success tapping the Asian community for information.

DMV records show a second address for the Lees about an hour away in northern Los Angeles County. Tax statements indicate that a woman named Bea Lee owns the three-bedroom frame house set in a housing development in the hills near Saugus.

Neighbors say Bea Lee has relatives in Ventura County and received frequent visits from her mother, who drives a Mercedes and speaks little English.

Bea Lee gave only vague responses when asked about her relationship with the Westlake Village family. “I have a very large family,” she said. When asked about the Lees’ disappearance, she said, “Maybe the gangs kidnaped them.”

Vanarelli, the prosecutor, is putting arrest warrants for both James and his brother, Frank, on the FBI’s National Crime Information Center computer, a network that would enable police all over the country to pick up the pair.

But he said he doesn’t expect to find the Lees in this country. So he is preparing paperwork for the FBI to search for them under the statute for unlawful flight to avoid prosecution.

That would enable FBI agents abroad to work with foreign agencies in finding the Lees. U.S. Customs officers could also look for the family and alert the FBI of their return to the country.

“We owe it to everyone, including the kids still sitting in custody,” Vanarelli said. “We shouldn’t give this kid a ‘bye just because he has the money to bail out.”

Lee’s alleged accomplices in the Feb. 3 fight, three Asian American juveniles, have been ordered to stand trial as adults in the matter.

Still, Vanarelli added: “From what I’ve been told, I shouldn’t expect too much.”

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Without an extradition treaty, Taiwan is under no obligation to return one of its own citizens to the United States. “We do make overtures, but for the most part the laws of the country say you don’t have to send them back,” said Alfred Gonzalez of the American Institute in Taiwan, an agency handling the United States’ informal relations with the Asian nation.

Despite the lack of formal ties, the countries do try to cooperate and can sometimes arrange extradition, said Eric Chao, of Taiwan’s Coordination Council for North American Affairs in Los Angeles.

Even if the youth is not returned to the United States, he could face punishment in Taiwan, Chao said. “We can find a way to do things,” he said. He said Ventura County officials have not contacted him about the Lee case.

Some Thousand Oak residents would like to see James Lee come back to face justice.

“I don’t think it’s right that anyone gets away with this and gets to flee from the court,” said Kathy Behling of Thousand Oaks, whose son David was one of the two football players shot and hospitalized following the melee. “It may solve (James Lee’s) problems here, but if he’s that kind of kid, he’s going to have trouble.”

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The truth is no one really knows what kind of kid James Lee is.

After the fight, he became known as the instigator who rounded up 15 purported gang members for a racial clash in the park.

But before the February incident, James had no criminal record. Neither did Frank, a UCLA student who police say helped gather Asian youths from three counties for the fight. Some of the youths who fought with them that day have admitted gang ties. But Vanarelli acknowledged that he had no firm evidence “beyond a reasonable doubt” that James Lee was a gang member.

James was described by neighbors as quiet and polite. But there were signs that he might be falling in with a “fast crowd,” one neighbor said.

Last summer, graffiti was painted on the cul-de-sac curb, and a neighborhood child said he saw James do it. A neighbor approached Hsin-E Lee, who agreed to have his son clean off the paint, but was adamant that his son did not deface the curb.

“He went around with his son and had him explain to all the neighbors that he hadn’t done it,” said one resident who asked to remain anonymous.

Later, the same neighbor noticed several young men visiting James. “They really looked like wanna-be gangsters,” she said. “We were really surprised when they were.”

But other neighbors and friends of the family doubt James was seriously involved with gangs. Rather, they felt he was harassed into the fight. A family friend recalls seeing a car full of white students drive up to the Lees’ gate a week before the incident.

“They were tough-looking guys, and they looked like they were looking for trouble,” he said.

James had reportedly been feuding with football player Curtis Simmons for the better part of a year. In an earlier fight, Simmons had broken James’ nose.

Later, James threatened to shoot him. Simmons responded: “If you pull a gun, I’m going to break your neck,” according to court testimony.

On Feb. 3, the pair agreed to meet at the neighborhood park for a fistfight. Simmons brought along about 10 other football players. James brought Asian youths, most of them armed with bats, boards or guns.

“It’s a very sad story, because he was planning to take his SAT test, planning to go to college,” said James’ attorney, Thomas Mesereau. “The fellow did not know who to turn to.”