Police on Thursday sought an arrest warrant for a couple who beat their 13-year-old daughter to death and kept the body hidden and mummified last year.
According to Sosa Police in Bucheon, investigators charged a 47-year-old pastor surnamed Lee and his wife Baek, 40, with manslaughter due to child abuse. If convicted, the suspects face a minimum of five years and up to a lifetime in prison.
The couple had admitted to beating the girl, but said her death was unintentional.
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| Suspects in the death of a teenage girl are moved to a holding cell from Sosa Police Station in Bucheon, Gyeonggi Province, Wednesday. (Yonhap) |
Preliminary autopsy results of the victim by the National Forensic Service showed a femur fracture and abdominal bleeding.
“It is impossible to determine the exact cause of death at this point, but we cannot rule out the possibility that (the victim) died of shock from trauma,” the NFS officials said. The NFS will release the full results next week.
The victim’s body was found at her father and stepmother’s house Monday morning, after she died on March 17, 2015, and was stashed away for nearly 11 months. Police believe that Lee may have purposefully created a dry environment at his home to hide the smell from the body, which was nearly mummified when it was recovered.
Neighbors testified that they did not notice any foul stench, but noted that the ventilator was turned on each night.
Lee told the police that he and his wife hit his daughter with a broom for five hours on the day of her death. He claimed to have kept the body at his home out of belief that “prayers will bring her back to life.”
But police said Lee’s claim is unlikely to be true, as he had reported the girl missing and told her teachers that she had absconded with a large sum of money.
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| The room where the mummified body of the teenage girl was found, surrounded by dehumidifying agents placed inside the room. (Yonhap) |
It was reported that the girl’s school did not report her disappearance to the local education authorities, although the law mandates school officials do so when a student misses school for 14 days without a reason given.
The case, which was unearthed during a police investigation of people who have gone missing for a long period, is the latest in a series of child abuse cases by parents that has sent shock waves reverberating through the country.
In response, the Education Ministry announced last week that it would conduct a pangovernmental checkup on elementary and middle school students who have missed school for three months or more from Jan.1 to March 31.
The Justice Ministry has rolled out plans to curb child abuse, which includes creating a department dedicated to crime on children and women at district prosecutors’ offices in Daegu and Gwangju and deploying 111 prosecutors specializing in child abuse cases across the country. The government will also expand the range of people mandated to report child abuse on sight, including workers at adoption agencies, centers for sexual victims, and child care support centers.
Last month, a man was arrested on charges of beating his 7-year-old son to death, mutilating the body and hiding it for more than three years.
According to the Welfare Ministry, 87 percent of child abuse occurred at homes while 83.3 percent of the perpetrators were parents.
Korean law says parents who repeatedly abuse and injure their children will lose custody. But it is rare for parental abusers to actually be punished.
According to the Korea Institute of Criminology, legal action was taken in only 572 of the 55,484 confirmed cases of child abuse from 2004 to 2013.
Often, the victims are guilt-tripped or threatened by their abusers against blowing the whistle.
Police investigation of the death of an 8-year-old girl in Chilgok, North Gyeongsang Province, initially pinpointed her older sister as the primary suspect. But further probing found that the girl had been forced to falsely confess by her stepmother, who had abused both sisters.
By Yoon Min-sik (minsikyoon@heraldcorp.com)
