Robert Lee, 51, male, was working inside Lee's Cathay Terrace, a family-run Chinese restaurant on Post Road in Warwick, Rhode Island, when gunfire shattered a June evening in 1978. It was June 17, and by the time the shots stopped, Lee and three of his co-workers—Dorothy Johnston, 38; John O'Dell, 40; and Danny Linn—lay dead in the restaurant. Contemporary memorial records and case write-ups list the four as having been killed by gunfire that night in Warwick, a tragedy that would
reverberate through local newspapers and victim registries for decades.
Investigators quickly focused on a former cook from the restaurant, and years of pretrial competency questions followed before the case could be tried. In early September 1987, a Rhode Island Superior Court jury found the former cook, Gan Fong Chin, guilty on four counts of first-degree murder for the June 17, 1978 killings at Cathay Terrace. According to reporting from the time, jurors deliberated for about seven hours over two days before returning their verdict. The judge later set sentencing for November 5, with Chin facing four mandatory life terms; a subsequent bid for a new trial was denied.
Accounts in the court record and contemporary coverage describe a sudden, close-quarters attack inside the dining room, where Chin produced a rifle and opened fire on his co-workers. One additional person collapsed and died of a heart attack amid the chaos after the shooting began. While the case took years to reach a courtroom, the jury's verdict ultimately resolved the question of who was responsible: Chin was convicted as the sole perpetrator.
The restaurant where Lee worked was a longstanding local establishment tied to several members of the Lee family, a fixture on Post Road that served generations before and after the tragedy. In the years since, community memorials have kept the names of the four victims together—Robert Lee, Dorothy Johnston, John O'Dell, and Danny Linn—marking the date and place where their lives were taken.
