As neighbors have rallied around her, a grocery owner refuses to abandon the West Parkside store where her husband was gunned down.

By Jennifer Lin
Reprinted with permission from
The Philadelphia Inquirer,
May 19, 2001

To her neighbors, she’s Miss Moon, the Korean lady who runs the little grocery store on 52d Street near Fairmount Park. Her real name is Yoon Suk Lee. The Moons were the couple who ran the store three years ago.

Mrs. Lee doesn’t mind the wrong name. The fact is, she only knows her friends from the neighborhood by one name. In a black marbled notebook by the cash register, she has jotted some of their numbers in pen. There’s Stanley, Wanda, Monica, Graham, Coffee.

Stanley-James Stanley, 53, who has an auto body shop a block away- ducks into her West Parkside store every day without fail.

"Everything OK, Miss Moon?" he asks. He’s a big man from Georgia- 6 feet, 4 inches big- and when he fixes his gaze on the tiny woman behind the bulletproof glass, he expects an honest answer.

And on bad days, sad days, when a customer may notice tears, word will get out. Stanley will tell Wanda, who will hurry to the store and use the wordless language of women- a pat, a look, a hug - to tell her, "We’re here."

Her neighbors have helped her get through the last few months. They understand her sorrow, struggle with their own rage, and feel a twinge of shame about what happened.

For it was someone from the neighborhood, police say, who killed her husband.

The tip of the pistol, cold and hard, was pressed to the middle of her forehead. She cannot forget how it felt that November evening.

Moon, where’s the money bag?

Yoon Suk Lee was flat on her back, on the floor by the register. The robber, one of two, gripped her neck in his gloved hand. She couldn’t see his face. A black-and-red bandana covered it. But that voice...

Moon, where’s the money bag?

She knew that voice. She heard it every day.

Moon, where’s the money bag?

By the grill and deli case in back, the second robber aimed his gun at her husband and another worker. But her husband darted around the counter, picked up a big can of ketchup, and threw it.

The robber with his hand on her throat spun around. Mrs. Lee heard a pop. Five steps away, her husband, the father of her two children, fell to the floor.

Wanda Lytle, a neighbor and friend, heard the gunshot, then sirens. She ran outside. In front of the store, a crowd vibrated with the news of the shooting.

Inside, she found the grocer’s wife kneeling beside her husband.

"I’m looking at her and she’s holding him, telling him over and over to get up," Lytle remembers.

Three days later, police arrested two 17-year-olds. Donald Brown and Christopher Walker were charged with murder as adults and held without bail. Both have pleaded not guilty and are expected to be tried in the fall.

Brown grew up three blocks from the store. Walker lived with his mother three doors away.

Neighbors thought they had seen the last of Mrs. Lee on that night of Nov. 4. The robbers stole $500 and left her husband, Duk Sang Lee, 50, bleeding to death in the aisle of his store. "I would’ve closed and not come back," said Monica Jordan, a neighbor and friend.

But persuading the 48-year-old widow to stay has become a cause for some of her neighbors. They see it somehow as part of West Parkside’s redemption.

After the shooting, Lytle, who lives in the next block and visits the store daily, told Mrs. Lee, "You’re not leaving us. We need you."

And James Stanley made it his business to keep an eye on her. "That’s my daily mission-to console her," he said.

Their efforts are working.

"A lot of people worry about me," Mrs. Lee said. "That’s why I stay here."

In West Parkside, the murder has stoked anger about guns and drugs, the twin horsemen ravaging the neighborhood. Talk to anyone there and he or she can rattle off names of victims of revenge killings, drive-by shootings, drug overdoses. None of the dead lived to see 30.

The relentless violence has numbed people. But when the Korean grocer was gunned down in his store during the dinnertime rush, neighbors closed ranks.

"We need to grab back this neighborhood and grab back our children," declared Lytle, who has lived within walking distance of the store for 37 of her 46 years. "His death was a turning point. It shook this place up."

West Parkside does not leave a good first impression. Too many homes are rotting and empty. Porches sag from neglect. Knots of truants spend suspicious time loitering around pay phones. Old-timers who live in tidy rowhouses barricaded with metal gates and deadbolts revel in what West Parkside was- and lament what it has become.

"It’s just falling apart," Geneva Murray bemoaned. "And no matter how much Crazy Glue you put on it, it’s not sticking together."

Murray, 54, has lived in the same prim rowhouse on Columbia Avenue near 52d since she was 9 years old. Her parents were one of the first black couples to move into what was then a Jewish neighborhood. The Baptist church on the corner used to house a synagogue, and from Parkside to Lancaster Avenues, 52d Street bustled.

"Two hoagie shops, two cleaners, a meat market, a fruit market, a hobby shop, a restaurant and a hardware store," Murray recalled. "All you had to do was walk out of the house to go to the store."

Today, all that’s left is a bar- and Mrs. Lee’s grocery.

Murray recited the store’s history: Opened decades ago by black merchants, who sold it to a Greek man, who turned it over to a Korean couple- the Moons-who sold it to the Lee family three years ago.

Without the store, neighbors would have to walk under the looming Amtrak train trestle to Lancaster Avenue just to buy milk or a loaf of bread.

"There are no more black stores and white people, they’ve been long gone," said an African American friend of Mrs. Lee’s. "If she would go, you could go for blocks and blocks and not find a store here."

Yoon Suk Lee has worked in some kind of mom-and-pop store since the day she arrived in Philadelphia as a newlywed from South Korea in 1980.

Her husband came from a grocery family. Of eight siblings, three had stores in the city. An older brother introduced Mrs. Lee to her future husband in Seoul.

The couple became merchants for the reason so many new immigrants run corner stores: It’s a way to make a living without speaking much English. Their first business was a dry cleaners near Temple University. Next came a take-out seafood business in North Philadelphia, then a grocery store in Southwest Philadelphia.

"I like the grocery business," Mrs. Lee said in halting English. "At the seafood restaurant, the hours were too long. We were open to midnight."

Asian merchants have prospered in this mom-and-pop trade, but it is a risky business. Almost every day in the city, the owner of a grocery store or deli is robbed, according to police statistics.

From 1988 to 1999, 100 Asians were murdered in Philadelphia- a third of them during holdups in businesses such as grocery stores, chain stores, delis or take-out restaurants. Last year, three Asian merchants were slain: a Korean grocer in North Philadelphia, killed during a robbery; a Chinese teenager, shot execution-style at his father’s take-out restaurant in Tioga; and Duk Sang Lee.

Feeling vulnerable to crime, many Korean grocers are getting out of the business; some are selling to newly arrived Dominican immigrants.

A few years ago, Yoon Suk Lee and her husband tried to get out. They sold their store in Southwest Philadelphia to a Chinese merchant and looked for a business like a dry cleaners in the suburbs, where they live. When nothing turned up, Duk Sang Lee bought the West Parkside grocery from his older sister, the original Miss Moon.

"We decided to go back to what we were used to," his widow said.

The store is just a sliver of floor space with chockablock shelves. Mrs. Lee sells necessities: diapers and cereal, shampoo and macaroni, cake mixes and milk, dog food, cat food, baby food. She carries one of just about everything: a deadbolt, a pair of jumper cables, an oscillating fan. It’s all there, from hair extensions to sweatsocks.

Two Korean relatives and an African American neighbor work with her, mostly handling take-out orders from the grill in back of the store.

From the start, the Lees got along with most customers. Neighbors liked their polite way. Mr. Lee used common sense. If a kid stole something, he told a parent instead of calling the cops every time.

Both of them were churchgoers, and on Monday morning, Mrs. Lee would chat with some of the ladies about her church service, and they, in return, would tell her about theirs.

Monica Jordan liked the way Mr. Lee teased her when her 2-year-old daughter whined for candy.

"She’s hungry," he implored on the girl’s behalf.

"No, she’s greedy," Jordan joked in reply.

Not everything was sweetness and nice. Some customers complained about prices. A few didn’t like the fact that the store sold single cigars and cigarettes and rolling papers-paraphernalia for smoking dope. Mrs. Lee told a neighbor that she was afraid to stop selling the items for fear of harassment.

Kids could be rude. Adults could be rude. And some patrons were rankled that outsiders who looked different, spoke differently, and didn’t even live in the neighborhood were making money off them.

Across Philadelphia, grocery stores are flash points for racial hostility. Like Jewish merchants before them, Asian store owners are symbols of the monied class in neighborhoods where there often is little money.

"You just got bad folks out there who feel you owe them something just because you’re rich," James Stanley said.

Jordan has given her own teenage son a lecture about the Korean grocers. "I told him, `Even if they’re not your race, you don’t be disrespectful,’ " she said. "They’re humans like you."

The day after the murder, Stanley placed a bouquet on the doorstep of the grocery store. Monica Jordan left a teddy bear holding a heart.

When Korean relatives came to clean the store, Wanda Lytle started to pray on the sidewalk. Out front, someone placed a poster that read "Rest in Peace Moon," for neighbors to sign.

On the door, the grocer’s family posted directions to the viewing at a Korean church.

The church was miles away, in Northeast Philadelphia. Jordan borrowed a neighbor’s car. Stanley gave some of the women a lift. Others took the bus up Roosevelt Boulevard to Cottman Avenue. And on the evening of Nov. 7, more than 40 neighbors showed up at the Sei Han Baptist Church.

They arrived early. Wanda Lytle remembered how Duk Sang Lee had invited her so many times to come to church with him some Sunday, but she’d never taken him up on his offer. She thought of that as she bent into the casket to kiss his cheek.

Yoon Suk Lee stood in a receiving line of relatives, including the couple’s 11-year-old son and 19-year-old daughter. None of the neighbors knew the children. They rarely came to the store.

When Jordan approached the receiving line, Mrs. Lee saw her and broke away. The Korean woman went straight towards the younger black woman and threw her arms around her neighbor.

"Why?" the widow sobbed. "Why?"

Mrs. Lee’s neighbors believe they know why.

"There’s nothing in this community for young people," Lytle said. "There are no jobs here. Right now, the streets have our children."

And from Robert Kinnard, 47, a respiratory therapist who lives around the corner from the store: "Young kids are told to do things to prove themselves. And this [holdup] is one of the things. It didn’t make sense."

And Ella Francis, a 75-year-old retired art teacher: "This is one of our lowest points. If you talk to kids on the streets, you don’t hear anyone who says, `I can make it. I can do it.’ "

The old woman despairs. "They’ve resigned themselves almost to the point of suicide. They don’t care about life."

Francis is a feisty activist who doesn’t just live in West Parkside; she loves it. She founded the Parkside Neighborhood Association in 1977 to save Fairmount Park green space from a parking lot for the Mann Music Center.

She traveled to Minneapolis to persuade a giant computer company to invest in a technology center for Parkside. She helped to start a day-care center. She encouraged neighbors to enroll in computer training programs. She prodded City Hall to spend millions clearing 65 acres for industrial development.

But none of it has stopped the neighborhood’s slide. People continue to move out, according to the 2000 census. In the last 10 years, the population has dropped by 25 percent in the area bounded by Parkside Avenue to the north, Lancaster Avenue to the south, Belmont Avenue to the east, and Bryn Mawr Avenue to the west. One out of three residents lives below the poverty line.

Although bleak, the statistics don’t gauge resolve. "This community doesn’t have to be in the trouble that it’s in," Kinnard said.

He wants to make his block a drug-free zone. At night, he patrols the streets as part of a Town Watch. His wife is working with some of the neighborhood women to keep children active this summer. They want to organize arts and crafts camp, bus trips, block parties.

And Stanley is doing his best to keep everyone up to his elbows in compost. The auto repairman believes the soil can restore the soul. He sees ugly and thinks impatiens, camellias, wisteria, sunflowers, daylilies and black-eyed Susans.

He tore up an alleyway of packed dirt next to his house and auto body shop on 52d. He planted big, leafy plants with a tropical look- hostas, ferns and umbrella-size "elephant ears." He laid stones for a winding path in his narrow oasis.

Then he looked across the street. He hired out-of-work neighbors and bored children to turn an eyesore lot into a vest-pocket park, with manmade hillocks and tufts of flowering shrubs.

Then he looked around the corner. He had his neighborhood crew clear another lot fronting busy Parkside Avenue. He planted a vegetable patch. He erected a makeshift pergola of white pillars salvaged from abandoned homes. He took the side rails from an old crib and built an archway. He recycled empty cans of paint thinner from his garage, glued them end to end, painted them white, and added more columns.

"When I came out here, I was dealing with druggies and poor people," Stanley explained. "I used them for gardening. They’ve grown to know me and I respect them. This area has changed."

His motto: "Your home is what you make it."

Which goes a long way to explain why he doesn’t want the grocer’s widow to flee Parkside.

It upsets many neighbors to know that two of their own have been accused of murdering the Korean grocer. Many of the friends of the Korean couple also know the families of the two teenage suspects. Stanley is godfather to the younger brother of Donald Brown.

"Everyone knows everyone here, we’re just that tight," Kinnard said. "It’s like someone in the family has violated you."

On a dreary spring day, a rainstorm howled through the city, forcing the hooded kids in front of the grocery store to huddle closer.

Across the street, a truckload of soil that was delivered for Stanley’s latest extravaganza- "I want an all-white flower garden"- looked like a mound of black velvet, rich and saturated with rain.

Mrs. Lee waited on customers from behind an inch-thick bulletproof window. Her neighbors finally persuaded her to install the protective glass. Wanda Lytle said Mr. Lee had resisted the idea, telling her, "If I have to put up a glass shield, then I don’t need to be here." But friends and family told her to install protection for her own sake.

Mrs. Lee has thought about selling the store, but only because the work is so hard, the hours so long. But she doesn’t expect to be going anywhere soon. She has college tuition to pay and a younger child to raise. Her daughter is studying graphic arts in New York City, while her son goes to a public school in Montgomery County, where the family lives.

She said if she ever did leave, the neighborhood wouldn’t be the reason. "I actually don’t have fear anymore," Mrs. Lee said.

In the basement of the store, she has three big trash bags filled with dried flowers and stuffed animals-mementos that neighbors left on her doorstep after the murder.

"My husband all the time joking," she said in her fractured way. "He happy man."

In back, her cook grilled a hamburger patty and onions. With each press of his spatula, grease hissed and sizzled, filling the store with warm, oily wafts. The phone rang, and Monica Jordan called in her lunch order. The front door opened, and Stanley stepped out of the rain.

Mrs. Lee had just learned that the gardens were his creations.

"Stanley, I didn’t know that," she teased him. "Why didn’t you tell me?"

"Oh," he said with a smile, "there’s a lot of hidden beauty down here."

Jennifer Lin is an Inquirer Staff Writer
Jennifer Lin’s e-mail address is jlin@phillynews.com.