Ronko Yamada

It was a lazy summer afternoon in 1973 when Ronko Yamada was killing time at her friend's apartment.

She was lying on the floor, flipping through the San Francisco Chronicle, when she saw an article that snapped her out of her summer haze.

Ronko knew Chol Soo Lee as the Korean kid hanging around her sister's jewelry shop in San Francisco's Japantown.

He was sweet, and they were friends.

But she knew him as Charles Lee.

So she made a few calls and confirmed that, yes, Charles Lee was in fact Chol Soo Lee, and he was being charged with murder.

Ronco did know one thing for sure, though.

Chol Su could not afford a defense attorney.

Ronko was a college student, so she couldn't afford one either.

But she figured she could at least support her friend during his trial.

So she drove to the courthouse in Sacramento.

And while she was sitting there, in the courtroom, a young Chinese man approached her.

Three years later, in 1977, a journalist named K.W.

Lee caught wind of Chol Soo's story.

Sojin Kim is a curator at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.

K.W.

was working as an investigative reporter for the Sacramento Union, the largest paper in California's capital.

And he could tell right away that something smelled fishy.

KW said that the first thing that failed his sniff test was the court record.

The arresting officer, while he was on the stand, kept referring to Chol Soo Lee as Chinese.