By A.C. Thompson

Jimmy Thull saw the brawl while walking to his job as a bookstore clerk. It was about 3:40 in the afternoon, and across Kearny Street two guys were going at it, grappling, kicking, punching. "It just looked like a normal fight on the street," said Thull, 23.

Then one of the men pulled out a handgun and shot the other man dead.

Though Thull didn't know it at the time, the guy with the gun was an off-duty cop, Steven Lee, an 11-year veteran of the San Francisco Police Department. The man he killed, Gregory Hooper, was a 36-year-old ex-con from Richmond.

Thull, who called a press conference last week to nervously relate his account of the Feb. 2 slaying, is one of three witnesses to the killing to surface in the media in recent days.

A Tenderloin beat cop, Lee told police investigators he shot Hooper in self-defense after Hooper attacked him. News reports have played up the dead man's extensive criminal record. ("Chinatown homicide victim had 19-page rap sheet," read one San Francisco Chronicle headline.)

What the press hasn't yet mentioned is that Lee has something of a rap sheet of his own.

In 1996 the Office of Citizen Complaints (OCC), the city's official police-watchdog agency, hit Lee with four serious misconduct charges – including an allegation of unnecessary force – stemming from a road rage-type incident. According to SFPD documents, Lee got heated when a motorist honked her horn at him.

Lee, police reports indicate, "exited his vehicle and yelled out at the female, asking her what she wanted of him. When she informed him that he had room to move his vehicle forward and that she wished he would do so [Lee] used language which included the word 'bitch,' directed at the female, several times."

If the police reports are any indication, the conflict escalated, with the cop attempting to arrest the woman. "After improperly detaining the civilian," Lee "ordered her to exit her vehicle and to turn off the vehicle's engine. When she refused to do so, the accused officer reached into her vehicle and broke the civilian's automobile key off in the ignition."

According to the charges, Lee also struck the woman on the shoulder and cut her hand with the broken car key.

In March 2000 the Police Commission – the SFPD's five-member oversight body – sent the allegations against Lee to Chief Fred Lau to be handled "administratively." It's unclear whether the allegations stood up or not, or whether Lee was disciplined. Asked whether Lee was censured, the department had no comment. However, sources familiar with the matter said Lee received a formal reprimand and was required to apologize to the woman.

This much is certain, though: the OCC, which receives roughly 1,000 complaints of police misconduct a year, brings charges against very few officers – generally doing so only when there's strong evidence of wrongdoing. (During 2000, for example, a grand total of 10 officers were charged.)

Given that the OCC wrote up a seven-page indictment of Lee, had the police chief sign off on it, and brought it to the Police Commission, one might conclude that the allegations against the cop probably didn't materialize out of thin air.

Still, is the cop's disciplinary record germane to Hooper's slaying? We put that question to SFPD spokesperson Sherman Ackerson. "One can draw a conclusion perhaps by looking at an officer's complaint history, but that's not necessarily relevant in this case," Ackerson said. "We encourage anyone with any information to come forward." The incident is being investigated by the SFPD's homicide and management control units (the latter is the department's internal affairs branch), as well as by the District Attorney's Office and, after a complaint from Thull, the OCC.

When the official inquiries are completed, it may turn out that Lee's use of deadly force was justified: By all accounts that have emerged so far, Hooper gave the cop a serious beatdown. Hooper – who did three years in the state pen and had several convictions for theft and assault – stood six-foot-four and weighed roughly 250 pounds; Lee is under six feet tall and far lighter. The melee sent the cop to San Francisco General Hospital, where he was treated for a minor concussion.

We were unable to contact Lee, who has been on medical leave since the incident.

One witness, Jack Frydenlund of Santa Rosa, told the Chronicle March 13, "I believe the officer shot the assailant out of anger, not fear."

In an interview with the Bay Guardian, Thull said he never heard Lee identify himself as a cop. "The police officer got hit in the face, and he went down," Thull said. "He got back up, and they started fighting again. And then he got knocked down again and was being kicked. [Hooper] was kicking him and then stepped back." According to Thull, Hooper was standing 5 to 10 feet away from Lee when the officer, squatting, squeezed off "four or five" rounds.