May 17, 2008 09:30 pm
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By Jeff Lehr
jlehr@joplinglobe.com
John Lee suspected cousin Ger Lee had not quit his opium habit when he saw him in January, shortly before his disappearance.
“I think I could tell, but I didn’t say something,” John Lee, 52, told the Globe in interviews last week.
John thought he could smell the narcotic on Ger’s clothes.
His troubled cousin came to his home near Cassville twice the second week of January, as Lee recalled. The first time, Ger, 40, came alone. The second time, a couple days later, he’d stopped over with his girlfriend, Soun Sachao, and their 5-year-old boy and baby daughter, who were living in Cassville at the time.
Ger was driving a black Acura, maybe 8 to 10 years old. Minnesota license plates. It seemed like a pretty nice car to John.
“I’m a free man now,” Ger told him on the first of the two visits.
John knew what Ger was talking about. A drug-possession charge Ger picked up the previous June in St. Paul, Minn., had been dismissed in early December. His lawyer managed to get the evidence — a little less than a pound of opium — suppressed.
John congratulated Ger and gave him a hug. But John also let him know he had talked to Ger’s attorney by telephone, and she’d told him Ger still faced obstacles. The authorities were holding his green card and other identification. He wasn’t out of the woods just yet, John tried to warn him.
“Make sure you stay clean,” John told his cousin. “Make sure you change.”
Ger promised that he would, he said.
During the second visit, in the company of Soun and his kids, Ger had spoken to John of his need to return to Minnesota “soon,” although he never said why. It proved to be the last time John would see him.
Ger Lee’s decomposed body was discovered in a field near Granby on May 5. John Lee helped identify the body by recognizing a distinctive gold Buddhist necklace his cousin wore that was found with the skeleton.
Hmong cousins
The fathers of the two Hmong cousins, natives of Laos, were brothers. John became in some ways like an older brother to Ger, he said. John immigrated to the United States in 1980 and obtained citizenship here about 14 years ago. Ger, a refugee in the mid-1980s, was not yet a U.S. citizen when he was murdered.
They’d taken different paths to Southwest Missouri.
John moved from San Jose, Calif., to Massachusetts for several years before coming to Missouri in 2004 to become a poultry and cattle farmer. He also works as a service technician for a poultry processor in Neosho. Lee said his family is one of about 100 Hmong-American families living in the Cassville area.
Ger began his sojourn in the United States in San Diego and lived in Fresno and Sacramento before moving to Missouri. He’d met Soun in California. When they showed up in Missouri three years ago, it was the first John had seen Ger since Ger was living in Fresno, and he and Soun had already had their first child.
St. Paul
Then, last year, while still living in Barry County, Ger got into trouble in Minnesota. Police stopped a vehicle he was driving in the early morning hours of June 27 in St. Paul, and allegedly located a package of opium in its center console.
A complaint sheet states that the vehicle was stopped on suspicion of possible involvement in a shooting incident, where several people were shot with a .22-caliber gun. The complaint does not state that any weapon was found in Ger’s possession, nor that any connection of the vehicle and its occupants to the shooting was ever established.
The document does state that Ger curiously asked police officers at one point for his medicine, and when they asked him what he was talking about, he’d replied: “The stuff in the console.” He allegedly told them that it was opium, that he used it as a painkiller and that he had just bought it.
Police also found $1,392 cash on Ger and a key card to a local motel. A search warrant served on the motel room turned up more suspected opium and $10,000 cash, according to the complaint. He was charged with first-degree possession of narcotics, a crime punishable by up to 30 years in prison and a $1 million fine in Minnesota.
Out on bail
John Lee went to Minnesota following Ger’s arrest to bail his cousin out with money he had scraped together from relatives. They put up more than $9,000 on a $50,000 bond through a bondsman, he said.
Ger told John that the opium and cash police seized actually belonged to somebody else. Lee said he did not know what to think about that. He knew Ger used opium, he said. He doubted that he was trafficking in it because he didn’t have that kind of money, he said.
Lee doesn’t know when or how his cousin’s opium use began, but it was probably in California, he said. He said Ger knew a lot of Hmongs there and in Minnesota. Some of them may have been users or traffickers, he said.
For a couple of months, John drove Ger back and forth to Minnesota for his court dates. They were long rides, chances to talk extensively with his cousin. John wanted to impress upon Ger the need to put opium use behind him, he said.
“But as soon as I start that part of the discussion, he doesn’t want to discuss it,” Lee said.
Eventually, Ger suggested that he remain in Minnesota while his court case was pending. It would save John having to drive him back and forth. Ger and Soun had had a falling out and separated in July or August, so there was less of a reason for him to return to Missouri each time, Lee said.
John knew little of what Ger was doing in Minnesota over the next several months, he said. Ger never told him where he was staying nor provided any address.
Hand tattoo
The Newton County Sheriff’s Department caught on to the possible drug-trafficking angle to Ger Lee’s murder early on in their investigation. Investigators here have been in contact with St. Paul police and have made some progress in the case, Sheriff Ken Copeland acknowledged this week.
Investigators do not believe Lee left for Minnesota alone in January. The Acura he was driving was not registered to him, Copeland said.
“We have every reason to believe it was returned to Minnesota,” the sheriff said.
He acknowledged that St. Paul police have been trying to locate the Acura. He said they also are seeking another Hmong man for questioning.
Ger’s girlfriend told investigators of a man who was with Ger when he returned to Cassville near the start of the year. The girlfriend described the man as having certain tattoos on his hand. Copeland said those tattoos match a description of tattoos on a man who was in the vehicle with Lee when he was arrested in St. Paul, according to police there.
“That’s who they’re trying to locate and, as of yesterday, they hadn’t,” the sheriff said on Friday.
‘Sam’
John Lee told the Globe that the only time he saw his cousin with a man he did not know was close to Thanksgiving. Ger and another Asian man stopped at John’s house where relatives had gathered for a Thanksgiving celebration. John said they told him they were hungry and asked if he would feed them.
John said he’d never seen Ger’s companion before. He introduced himself as “Sam,” but Ger had addressed him as “Duke” a few minutes later, he said.
“I know he was Asian,” Lee told the Globe. “He didn’t speak Hmong. But I didn’t know if he was Hmong, Laotian, Vietnamese or Cambodian.”
He does not recall seeing any tattoo on his hand. He said he had spoken in Hmong directly to “Sam,” and the man had not replied, leading him to believe he did not speak the language.
John Lee said another cousin of Ger’s, who happens to be his neighbor, told John after John reported Ger missing on Feb. 21 that he believed he saw Ger in the company of a man in the Barry County town of Exeter the first week of February. They were in a blue pickup truck, he said the neighbor told him.
Lee said he never saw his cousin in possession of any gun. But Soun told him recently that she had walked in and found Ger cleaning a handgun once in the presence of their children, he said. She had been upset with Ger about it, he said.
DEA brief
Laos is one of several mainland Southeast Asia nations where the opium poppy is grown.
A Drug Enforcement Administration intelligence brief published in 2001 and accessible on the Internet states: “There are an undetermined number of opium smokers among the 100,000-plus ethnic Hmong and Mien refugees from Laos, most of whom have settled in Northern California, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
“Although reliable information on the wholesale Southeast Asian opium trade in the United States has been difficult to obtain, it can be assumed that the price of Laos-origin cooked opium among opium dealers in the United States may range from $2,000 to $2,500 per kilogram. Suppliers in Laos or Thailand may be paid as much as $1,000 per kilogram to mail opium to the United States. Cooked opium usually is smuggled to the United States by mail parcel.”
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Photos
Ger Lee