Metro Atlanta storm’s sole victim led a life in pieces

The twister that tore through downtown Atlanta six months ago crossed right over a Georgia Dome packed with March Madness basketball fans, raged down a street of skyscrapers and ripped the roof off a factory loft.

Incredibly, no one was killed. Or so it seemed. Then, a week later, came a footnote.

Enlarge this image

Tornado victim Gregory Lee (back) is pictured here with his sister Janice Lee in an old family photo.

Enlarge this image

Tornado victim Gregory Lee is pictured here with former Hawk John Brown in a family photo.

• Photos: Tornado damage

Workmen clearing bricks from the collapsed wall of a storefront church uncovered the storm’s only fatality. Beneath a three-foot pile of rubble was the body of a man in a blue hoodie and black trousers. He was slender, about 5-foot-10, and otherwise unidentified. He’d been beneath the wreckage of the Decatur Street building for a week. No one had missed him.

“Nobody called — no wife, no brother, no sister,” Atlanta police Officer James Polite said at the time.

Several days later, the man was identified as Gregory Lee, 45, a homeless man who sometimes slept in a nearby bus shelter.

By that time, the scene of his death in the Mar. 14 tornado had been transformed. The remaining walls of the storefront were leveled, the bricks removed, the slab swept clean. The building had been erased. Seemingly, so had the memory of Gregory Lee.

There was no marker, no obituary, no service. Lee’s body was soon cremated. Perhaps the most sensational weather drama in the city’s history had, in the lead role, a man who was all but invisible. So Lee’s tale remained untold.

Even now, six months later, piecing together details of Lee’s life is difficult. But through conversations with friends and family members, what emerges is the story of an ordinary, out-of-luck man who disappeared under extraordinary circumstances.

A good man gone wrong

Gregory and his sister Janice Lee grew up in the Grady Homes housing project, and were two years apart at Smith High School. After high school, he entered military service before driving trolley buses for MARTA and school buses for Atlanta Public Schools, his sister said.

In 1994, Janice Lee said, their mother died, which “seemed to get him more depressed.” After that, she said, he got caught up in drugs.

As a boy, Mike Taplin attended H.R. Butler Elementary School with Lee. They remained friends all these years later, even as both ended up on the street. Lee, Taplin said, was a good man who went wrong.

The two of them used to hang around the In Towne Market convenience store, across Decatur Street from the Martin Luther King MARTA station on the edge of downtown. Lee may have attended services at the adjoining storefront church, the Fellowship of Faith Worship Center, which often set up grills on the sidewalk and served hot dog meals to those in need.

Homeless men had gathered in the area because of the shelter offered in nearby vacant buildings, a refuge all but eliminated by the recent construction boom along Decatur Street. Parked next to the Worship Center was a small bus that the center’s pastor, Rev. Alonzo Webb, often used to ferry congregants from other areas around downtown.

On a few occasions, some of the homeless broke into the bus for a place to sleep, said Webb. He finally had to instruct his deacon to chain the bus doors at night.

Lee may have been one of the men who sought shelter inside the bus. He ended up outside it the night the tornado swept down Decatur Street to the church’s door.

“He was trying to get his life back on the road,” says Lee’s son and namesake, Gregory L. Lee.

His father left their home shortly after he was born, Lee Jr. said, but stayed in touch for birthdays and other holidays. Sometimes, he’d send a card.

“We’d always get together on his birthday and play a little basketball,” said Lee, an East Point resident who is training to become a restaurant manager. At 26, he’s a father of two himself. Gregory Lee the elder, he said, often dropped by to visit his grandchildren. He’d last been by two weeks before he died.

“He was real laid-back; he liked to read, to find out what was going on in the world,” said Lee Jr.

On the night of the tornado, Lee’s friend Taplin had finished doing odd jobs for Sam Panj, who manages the In Towne Market. He was drinking a beer by the dumpsters in the store parking lot when the weather turned strange.

“It came in quick,” said Taplin.

As the wind picked up and hail began to fall, Taplin and three or four other men sought shelter inside the store.

“They said a tornado was coming,” said Panj. “I said, ‘What the … ? A tornado? In downtown Atlanta?’ I didn’t believe it.”

But Panj let them in. The wind nearly pulled the door out of his hand, so he locked it behind him. He didn’t see anyone else outside.

At that same moment, Lee was on the east side of the building, huddled between the bus and the wall of the storefront church.

Panj and the men inside his store listened to the rushing wind and watched debris fly through the air. Ten minutes later, the air was still again.

When Panj unlocked the door and peered back outside, he saw mature trees toppled. He also noticed that the storm had blown over a billboard, which landed on top of the store. Its heavy I-beam stanchions had knocked a hole in the roof and shook the foundations of the small store.

Next door, a wall had collapsed, covering the church bus with bricks. It had also buried Lee, but neither Panj nor anyone else knew he was there.

A family mourns

When Lee’s body was uncovered a week later, neighborhood folks recognized him. His son heard rumors that the dead man was his father when he went to the Grady Homes area to visit a relative that weekend, and approached Atlanta police to identify the body. He then called his aunt Janice.

After she heard from her nephew, Janice Lee also went to the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s office, where she was shown a photograph of her brother’s body.

She has kept a few old photos of Gregory, fading Polaroid snapshots from long ago. She and her brother had their differences, she said. On the day he died, she hadn’t spoken to him for at least five years. But the coroner’s photograph was a painful sight.

“I hate that that happened to my brother,” she said.

Gregory Lee was a veteran, a ballplayer, a grandfather. Those who knew him say he’ll be missed.

“He wasn’t the best father in the world,” said his son, “but he was there.”