Despite Many Precautions, Party Ended in Tragedy

The Halloween party’s hosts hired security and shuttle buses to ferry guests up and down the winding canyon roads that led to the house known as the Castle. They even planned to move the festivities to an artist’s loft after midnight to minimize late-night noise.

But the sequence of events that unfolded early Saturday morning after a neighbor’s complaint call rendered all of those precautions tragically meaningless.

When two police officers walked around the side of the Benedict Canyon mansion, one of them looked through a window and fired several shots at a guest he thought was armed with a pistol.

On Sunday, friends and relatives mourned the death of Anthony Dwain Lee, questioning whether the actor even saw police out the window and saying the toy gun he turned out to be carrying was part of a costume he regularly donned.

They described the 39-year-old actor as making steady strides in a career that he began pursuing 20 years ago as a path away from gang violence.

Poised on the cusp of what fellow actors said were bigger things, Lee had a recurring role in the TV series “Brooklyn South” as a minister objecting to police abuse. Friend said he was a devout Buddhist and the antithesis of violence.

As a fuller portrait of Lee emerged Sunday, more mysteries than answers remained about his death.

Neighbors of the five-story mansion where Lee was killed said they were puzzled why anyone called police to complain about what they said was an orderly gathering of 100 to 200 that was breaking up at 1 a.m. Saturday, and that they were appalled at the tactics of the police once they arrived.

“It’s a nuisance call,” said Nancy Clement, who lives across the street. “It’s about noise,” not a robbery or a domestic problem where police would have reason to suspect violence.

Police refused Sunday to expand on their statements that Lee’s death was tragic but justified, saying he was shot to death by a three-year veteran, Officer Tarriel Hopper, 27, who feared for his life because he believed Lee was pointing a pistol at him.

The coroner’s office would only say Sunday that Lee had died of multiple gunshot wounds.

Police said Hopper and his partner had gone around the side of the house to look for its owner when they spotted Lee pointing a gun at them through a window.

The house’s absentee owner and builder, Warren Lipson, wondered why the police had ventured behind the house: “They walked up the open driveway and passed by several kitchen windows and other large windows in the living room, all of which were full of people in costume,” he said. “There were several doors they could have gone in, but they didn’t do that. They continued to walk on, peering through windows.”

Neighbors had trouble understanding the decision to shoot. “The assumption that someone is pointing a loaded gun at you, at a costume party, is totally nuts to me,” said Nancy Clement’s husband, Dick. “How about flinging yourself below the window rather than ending someone’s life?” Clement asked.

Several friends wondered whether Lee’s race played a role in his death. “He’s a black man who died in a white neighborhood,” said Mary Lin, one of Lee’s friends. The officer who killed Lee was also black.

Steve Sims, a nurse attending the party who tried to save Lee’s life, recalled that Hopper was distraught after shooting Lee, asking repeatedly as they waited for an ambulance: “Why did he have to pull that gun?”

Sims said that Hopper initially blocked his access to the room in which Lee lay but relented when Sims insisted he had to check on Lee’s condition.

Sims said he could not find a pulse.

He saw a toy gun that looked real inches from Lee’s hand, Sims said.

Another partygoer, Erik Quisling, said that a friend on Sunday visited the scene of the shooting and found five bullet holes through the window and in a wall.

Quisling raised questions about whether Lee could have even seen police standing in a dark area outside a brightly lighted room.

Barbara Berkowitz, a screenwriter neighbor who attended the party, described the five young men who rented the house--known as the Castle because it resembles one--as “model citizens.”

“This is not a house that has a lot of parties; these are young adults who are extremely considerate, to a fault, and respectful,” said Berkowitz, who described the party as being well in hand when she left soon after midnight.

Berkowitz and other neighbors said the men went door to door to tell residents they were having a party, promising to try to keep the noise and traffic to a minimum.

Mitch Hagerman, who attended the party and whose brother is one of the housemates, said the planning had been “well organized, really responsible, with shuttles, taxis, a rented loft so people would be out before midnight.”

The party-throwers also offered to put some neighbors up in hotel rooms to make sure they weren’t bothered by noise, according to one neighbor, Drew Snyder.

Friends described Lee as a serious actor with an interest in helping youngsters find alternatives to criminal activities through Buddhist practices.

“He was what we call in Buddhism a bodhisattva, a person whose life is devoted to serving others,” said grief-stricken friend Mitch Hale.

Hale said that Lee chanted morning and evening at his Van Nuys garden apartment and was active as a men’s and youth leader at a Buddhist community center in North Hollywood.

Annie Esty, a former girlfriend, neighbor and one of many people he introduced to Buddhism, wept as she read from a pamphlet he had given her: “It is the promise of . . . Buddhism that we can attain a state of freedom and unshakable happiness for ourselves while creating harmony with others.”

Born in Redding, in Northern California, and raised in Sacramento, Lee had a troubled adolescence.

His sister, Tina Vogt, said Lee was enterprising enough to get other students to deliver him his homework and smart enough to get A’s even though he seldom attended classes.

“I was his biggest fan,” said Vogt, who works as a civilian assistant to the Sacramento chief of police. “To be really honest, there’s no way to really understand it.”

Hale portrayed Lee’s youth in harsher terms. “He was a gangster in his adolescence,” Hale said Lee had told him. “He was stabbed in a street fight. His mother wanted to get him off the streets and enrolled him in an acting class.”

He eventually moved to Oregon, then to Seattle, where he became one of the top actors in a thriving theater scene, said friend and fellow actor John DiFusco.

Lee understudied for the lead role in “Two Trains Running,” and acted in “Raisin in the Sun.” “Anthony did not have to look for work as an actor in Seattle. It looked for him,” said Hale, who met him there.

He moved to Los Angeles to play the part of a former slave serving as a U.S. Cavalry scout in the play “Buffalo Soldier.” A Times review called the cast “uniformly superlative” and, Hale, said, Lee’s performance won him the Los Angeles Weekly best actor award that year. It also won him the interest of a manager and launched him into television and movie work.

Among his credits, friends said, were an appearance as a paraplegic criminal in the film “American Strays,” a role in several episodes of the cable television series “Any Day Now,” and a small part in the Jim Carrey hit movie “Liar Liar.” Lee played a lawyer who would not lie. He recently taped several guest appearances that have not yet aired of the television show “ER.”

Friends are planning a vigil at 7 p.m. today outside the West Los Angeles police station where Hopper is assigned.

They said they will remember a man who had a towering presence, both physically and spiritually. Lee stood 6 feet, 4 inches and radiated charm, energy and an expansive love for the people around him, they said, so much so that one friend said 20 others probably considered him their best friend.

“He was the biggest person I had ever met,” said his former wife, Serena Scholl of Sherman Oaks, who was married to Lee for almost eight years, divorcing in 1996. “He had a personality the size of the Taj Mahal.”