Rally Demands Justice in: Fong Lee Killing

by David Jones / June 2009

ST. PAUL, Minn.—Protesters rallied on May 11 at the Federal Courthouse here to demand justice for the police murder of 19-year-old Fong Lee. On July 22, 2006, Hmong-American youth Fong Lee was gunned down in broad daylight by the Minneapolis Police Department. He was shot in the back four times by a cop named Jason Andersen while he was running away after being hassled on a playground by Andersen and his partner.

As Lee lay on the ground, Anderson shot him four more times. He was unarmed. The police planted a pistol on him that has been proved to have been in the police property room the previous day. There were no fingerprints, no palm prints, no DNA, no blood spatter on the gun the police say Fong Lee had. The video taken by a camera in the cop car was erased. Unfortunately for the killer(s), a nearby school had three security cameras running that showed clearly that Fong Lee was unarmed.

Police immediately seized the tapes, but refuse to release more than three seconds of the 30-second pursuit tape. But even those three seconds show Fong Lee running away from Andersen, and it is plain he has nothing in his right hand. The tape shows three youth simply riding their bicycles in the school parking lot when they are charged by a police squad car. They quickly abandon their bikes and start running, while Andersen and his partner exit their cruiser, and run after an unarmed Lee, pointing a gun at him.

The liberal political establishment in Minneapolis closed ranks behind the killer cop. A grand jury, convened 11 months after the killing, cleared the officer of any criminal wrongdoing, and the department's internal investigation found he didn't violate any procedures. Not only did Minneapolis police insist the shooting was justified, but incredibly, in July, the notoriously corrupt Minneapolis Police Department awarded Andersen a "Medal of Valor," one of its highest honors for bravery.

In a police report from February 2004, then-Sgt. Mike Fossum wrote that an officer found a loaded Russian-made .380 gun in a snowbank. The officer notified Fossum that the gun had been taken during a burglary in north Minneapolis a few weeks earlier. The officer reached the burglary victim, who said the recovered gun sounded like his. The officer said the gun would be returned after a trial of the accused burglars.

Six days after Lee's death, a police department report indicated that the gun recovered by Lee's body was the same Russian-made .380. The serial number matched the one of the gun taken in the burglary. Prompted by the immediate scandal generated by this blunder, police rapidly issued another report, dated several days later, stating that the gun recovered in the snowbank was a FNH pistol with a different serial number. The officer involved in the 2004 burglary case now said the serial number on the wrong gun had been checked.

The Lee family is attempting to get some justice by suing in federal court. "At first look, the protest was like many others," Minnesota Public Radio reported. "Demonstrators carry signs and walk back in forth on the sidewalk in front of the courthouse. But the chants are not immediately recognizable to those who don't speak Hmong. ‘That means we want justice. That means we want justice in Hmong,’ translates organizer Tou Ger Xiong."

"Rally organizer Dai Thao says the case sparked anger in the Hmong community that those on the outside did not see," Minnesota Public Radio reported. "But Dai Thao says many Hmong have the same concerns as other minorities about getting fair treatment from police officers. He says his community is now learning to speak out and reach outside the group.

"We face a lot of racial injustice. Not just from the police department, but in the workplace and the community," Thao said. "We've learned a lot from the African American community and the civil rights movement."

The killing is a demonstration of the escalating use of deadly force by police terror squads. It is evident in reviewing similar recent "killings while fleeing police" murders in which the killers are not only not punished but praised, that an unannounced policy treating flight from the police as a capital crime punishable by summary execution has been broadly implemented throughout the apparatus of capitalist repression in in this country.

The liberal politicians in Minnesota will not touch this case, standing four-square behind the homicidal Minneapolis Police Department. Amy Kolbuchar, Democratic Farmer Labor (DFL) US Senator from Minnesota, was Hennepin County (Minneapolis) prosecuting attorney prior to her election to the Senate, where she refused to seek to indict violent and homicidal Minneapolis cops.

The Hmong community in the Twin Cities is over 40,000, the largest of any U.S. metropolitan area. The Laotian Hmong people and other Southeast Asian ethnic groups began arriving in the U.S. as officially sponsored "refugees" at the close of the Vietnam War some 35 years ago. They were generally given financial, political, and moral support from the government, media, politicians, and allied private organizations.

The titular chiefs of the Hmong American community are old CIA collaborators (so-called "generals") who ran a behind-the-lines guerrilla war in Laos while the war in Southeast Asia was pursued by the U.S. (and earlier by French imperialism). The Hmong in Minnesota have been gradually passing over into the status of an oppressed and economically deprived community, and escalating police violence against the youth is one symptom.

The 2000 federal census, nearly 10 years ago, reported that 33 percent of the state's Hmong lived below the federal poverty line, compared to 19 percent of all Minnesota Asians in poverty, and just eight percent of the state's total population. In 2000, 30 percent were born in Minnesota, and that proportion is undoubtedly far higher now.

The fact that this demonstration was called by, among others, the Lao Family Community of Minnesota, Inc., the primary establishment organization, marks a shift towards redefining the government as an opponent, rather than an ally.