Death cuts off dreams of man recently freed after 3 decades in prison
Lee Harris died just as he was embarking on the final chapter of a life interrupted.
Harris spent 33 years in prison, convicted of murder. During his decades of incarceration, he obtained a college associate degree, volunteered in prison ministries and directed gospel choirs, all while trying to prove his innocence.
Eight months before his death last Thanksgiving at age 68, the Chicago man finally won back his freedom.
When he started serving time he was a young married father from Cabrini-Green who had helped organize youth athletic programs and anti-violence events and worked with prominent figures such as Mayor Jane Byrne and Jesse White, then a state representative.
Harris also was a self-admitted hustler and petty thief on parole for burglary. When police arrested him in the 1989 murder of a promising young graduate student, they cited his shifting stories. He would later say he’d been foolish — naively repeating what police told him to say with an eye on collecting a $25,000 reward.
“I ain’t no angel,” he told the Chicago Tribune that year. “But I don’t hurt no one. I’m a thief, but I never been violent in my life.”
The crime was horrific. Armed assailants had abducted 24-year-old Dana Feitler from the lobby of her Gold Coast apartment building, forced her to withdraw money from an automated teller machine and left her unconscious in a nearby alley with a bullet wound in her head.
It would be years before the case against Harris finally unraveled, as allegations of police misconduct, mistaken witness identification, an unreliable jailhouse snitch and other constitutional violations surfaced. A defining moment in his legal battle came when Harris became friends with a cellmate who later made it his life’s work to help clear him.
Last March, a judge finally vacated Harris’ conviction and sentence, and prosecutors declined to try him again. He was out. Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx said her office “had determined that Harris didn’t in fact do this” and was “likely actually innocent.”
But, as one struggle ended, another began.
Harris returned to a much-changed city that seemed foreign to him. His former home, Cabrini-Green — a public housing complex once infamous as a symbol of crime and urban blight — had been gradually demolished and replaced by new retail and sleek condos.
Foxx, who spent part of her childhood in Cabrini, told the Tribune she met Harris at an event in early October and sensed a heaviness to his spirit. Though thankful to be free, he was tearful and anxious, she said.
“I couldn’t imagine anything scarier, to me, than prison. But he was scared of a world that was foreign to him,” she said. Foxx said the two swapped stories about “a home that was no longer there.”
She said, “I tried, in that moment, to assure him that he would be OK.”
Relatives and friends say Harris did indeed
