Jason Lefkowitz met Bryant Lyles about five years ago. Lefkowitz was on his bicycle. Lyles was in his grave.

“It was just sheer chance,” Lefkowitz said.

Lefkowitz used to live in Alexandria and would often go on bike rides. One afternoon, he stopped for a water break at Beulah Cemetery on Beulah Street in Franconia. There, he saw the stone that marks the final resting place of Bryant Amos Lyles, son of William and Julia Lyles. The marker is engraved with the scantest details of Lyles’s life: “Born May 8, 1898. Killed on Smoot’s Dredging Machine Sept. 1, 1917.”

“It seemed very obvious that there was a story there,” Lefkowitz said. “You don’t see a lot of headstones that have something that specific, calling out someone by name.”

Who was Smoot, Lefkowitz wondered. What was his dredging machine? And how did Lyles come to lose his life on it?

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The death obviously stuck in the craw of whoever paid for the headstone. Markers usually bear such positive euphemisms as “Taken too soon” or “Called to heaven.” Not this one: Killed.

“Somebody wanted to send a message with this headstone,” said Lefkowitz, a 44-year-old software developer. “I wonder what that message was.”

The first thing Lefkowitz did was check old copies of The Washington Post. He found a brief item in the “Police News Notes” section of the Sept. 2, 1917, edition: “Bryant Lyles, 19, of Alexandria, Va., was drowned yesterday when he slipped from a dredge on which he was working about a half a mile above the Highway bridge. Corbin T. Jackson, also of Alexandria, who was working with Lyles, tried to save him, but in vain. The body was recovered.”

Lefkowitz dug deeper.

Smoot Sand & Gravel was founded in 1900 by Lewis E. Smoot, son of an Alexandria coal and lumber merchant. Sand and gravel made Smoot quite wealthy. His firm was paid to dredge sand and dirt from the river bottom to accommodate shipping traffic. Smoot owned land along the river, too, from which he could scoop up sand and gravel, both important building materials that were much in demand as Washington grew.

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Lyles did not come from privilege. Lefkowitz studied census and other records and found that his family was a poor one and that young Bryant seems to have been raised by his grandparents.

Lefkowitz said he was struck by the contrast between the lives of the two men: one obscure, one born into money.

“In the few interviews I was able to find with Smoot, he was very clear that he had earned his fortune as the result of hard work,” Lefkowitz said. “I’m sure he did work hard. On the other hand, he had a loan from his father for $25,000.”

Lefkowitz often consults for progressive organizations, so he’s attuned to the injustices that permeate our society.

Said Lefkowitz: “Ultimately, the question for me was: Was this sort of just the way things were, or was there something remarkable about this event?”

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Sadly, in those pre-OSHA days, workplace fatalities were not uncommon. In 1914, James Dent fell from a Smoot dredge and drowned. C.W. Lawrence died after falling from one in 1929. In 1942, 18-year-old Garland Leo Lail fell off a Smoot dredge and drowned. His father worked as a cook on the vessel.

As for Lyles, the Washington Times reported he was working barefoot on top of the pilot house, which was slippery from the early-morning rain.

But why barefoot? Why the pilot house?

“At a certain point, it was obvious I was never going to get 100 percent of this story,” Lefkowitz said.

Earlier this year, Lefkowitz moved to South Carolina for a new job. Then the novel coronavirus came.

“When we started in the pandemic, I was looking at this big pile of notes I accumulated,” he said. “I thought, if I’m ever going to write this, now seems like the time. I’m just going to write what I have.”

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So Lefkowitz wrote up 4,000 words detailing his search, and on May 1, he posted them on Medium under the title “Two Lives, One Death and a Mystery.”

He’s hoping to shake loose more information. Maybe someone from Lyles’s family heard a story about the drowning. Maybe the business records of the Smoot company are sitting in some warehouse. (The sand and gravel concern was sold in 1961 to the Pittsburgh-based Dravo Corp., which was in turn bought by a Belgian mining company in 1998.)

“My goal is not to make L.E. Smoot a villain,” Lefkowitz said. “I don’t have an ax to grind in this. I just feel like this is a story that could be told and should be told.”

Twitter: @johnkelly

For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/john-kelly.

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