Of the 40 people he's approached, all but two have been willing to talk, Lee said. Most, in fact, have jumped at the opportunity to vent about their struggles.
"But this one young guy I follow would give me very quick responses. 'Oh, things are good,' he'd say." But little more.
That changed when Lee dropped by the man's house and saw a copy of Gears of War, a gory video game whose participants try to save their allies on the fictional planet Sera from a nasty subterranean enemy.
Lee had been a gamer in college at Berkeley.
"So I started playing video games with him," he said. "And during this time, he just really opened up."
The man told Lee he was lonely. He'd had to move after the shooting - it had happened too close to home. And since the shooting he'd been unable to work.
"He became more honest and forthcoming about his life, more than when we were just sitting across the table from each other," Lee said. "I just go and do whatever the person I'm following is doing, and in that process I discover stuff I didn't know about them."
That method has taken Lee to Philadelphia's open-air drug markets, where victims of gunshot wounds pick up painkillers their doctors will no longer prescribe.
He's seen and heard what it's like to walk around with a bullet lodged in your body - often the medically prudent approach, he said, but nonetheless extremely disruptive and an unwelcome reminder of trauma.
We sat in a Starbucks in West Philadelphia, near Lee's office. He is in his second year as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society scholar. Penn's program offered him his only postdoc interview, and it was the only position he wanted. If you are interested in studying the effects of a gunshot wound, Philadelphia is a good place for it.
