Man electrocuted while installing HVAC unit at Tucson charity

Dalton Lee was a business owner who had a soft spot for young people, and who recently talked about finding a way to mentor teens who might be interested in pursuing an HVAC career.

He died Monday while installing an AC unit at a Tucson clothing bank where he often volunteered.

Lee, 35, was holding onto a chain to help guide the new unit onto the roof at Spreading Threads Clothing Bank, 2945 N. Flowing Wells Road, when a crane touched an overhead power line. Lee was electrocuted and died that night at a hospital.

“He would work late into the nights here, to do this on off time, but do regular stuff all day just to save us money,” said Michele Wright, co-founder and CEO of the clothing bank, who met Lee about a year-and-a-half ago.

“I was so inspired by everything about him,” she said. “How motivated he was to succeed, how great and patient he was explaining everything to me. He’s just a lovely human.”

The clothing bank is focused on providing clothes and services to children and families in the foster care system.

Lee, with his wife Caty, owned C Gencon HVAC.

Caty Lee said she wants her husband to be remembered for who he was, not his job.

The couple’s paths first crossed in 2008 when Caty Lee was a manager at IHOP.

Back to homepage

Subscriber Login

Keep reading with a digital access subscription.

Subscribe now

However, their first real introduction came later, when she began a new job at a Tucson call center.

“Our training class walked down the call floor and there was this guy in the back corner, on the phone, with this 12-foot phone cord because he couldn’t sit still, and he just caught my eye,” she said. “Testament to the next 12 years of my life, by the way.”

The two began dating in June 2012 and married in July 2013.

“It was just the universe’s way of telling me to stay in touch with him, and within a month [of dating] we knew,” she said. “He was ring shopping by August and proposed in September.”

“The running joke was that ‘I stayed and never left’. That was always his joke, that I didn’t give him a choice,” Caty Lee said. “I told him that he never would’ve wanted it any other way, and he said, ‘absolutely not.’”

Caty Lee has three children from a previous marriage. They had another together. But Dalton Lee never made the distinction, always saying they had four kids, Caty Lee said.

“We were just starting to talk about ways local business owners could mentor some of the teens in the group homes. We just talked about him maybe finding a couple kids that could be interesting in that profession and tagging along with him to learn about the HVAC world,” Wright said of Dalton Lee.

“We’ve only been in this building a year-and-a-half and it’s a work in progress, but I fully intend on memorializing him some way.”