■ Broadcasting: FM 94.5 (06:40~06:55, 12:40~12:55, 19:40~19:55)
■ Broadcast Date: December 18, 2024 (Wednesday)
■ Host: Lawyer Jeong Tae-geun
■ Dialogue: Attorney Kim Hee-eun
* The text below may differ from the actual broadcast content, so please check the broadcast for more accurate information.
◇ Lawyer Jeong Tae-geun (hereinafter referred to as Jeong Tae-geun): When dealing with criminal cases. There are so many causes of death. But Kia Temple. So if you die because you can't beat hunger, this is very rare. Especially in this day and age. However, the cause of death of the victim in this case, which I will tell you today, was malnourished. Even in 2021. So even though it happened only three years ago. Mr. A, who was found dead naked, was living in an officetel with two friends at the time. But there were more than a few suspicious places for two men called this friend. Victim A's torso was full of signs of assault. In response, A's father filed a complaint with the police against two men in their 20s who made his son like this. But surprisingly, these two men were roommates who were friends with A. What the hell did this happen? Today's case X file, let's take a closer look at this case. Hello. <Lawyer Lee Won-hwa's Case X File> This is lawyer Jeong Tae-geun. With lawyer Kim Hee-eun of Law Firm Roel. Welcome, lawyer.
◆ Lawyer Kim Hee-eun (hereinafter Kim Hee-eun): Hello, I'm lawyer Kim Hee-eun of Law Firm.
◇ Jeong Tae-geun: It's a really horrible incident where an adult man in his 20s starved to death at the weight of 30kg. I can't believe this happened three years ago.
◆ [Kim Hee-eun] It's an incredibly horrible incident. On June 13, 2021, a 20-year-old man identified by his surname Park was found naked on the floor of an officetel toilet in Yeonnam-dong, Mapo-gu, Seoul. Park had signs of assault on bond, and he seemed to have died without eating properly, weighing only 34 kilograms at the time of discovery. Paramedics and police who were dispatched at the report of a friend who lived together were also shocked to see the victim's death.
◇ Jeong Tae-geun: The bare rice was placed on the toilet where the victim was found. There's also a story like this.
◆ Kim Hee-eun: The victim was thin enough to weigh only 34 kilograms and was found in the bathroom with her clothes peeled off. There was water and rice in a paper cup on the toilet bowl. An autopsy revealed that the cause of death was pneumonia and malnutrition.
◇ Jeong Tae-geun: I wonder who on earth would have done such a terrible thing.
◆ Kim Hee-eun: The victim's wrists and ankles, which were found naked in a narrow bathroom, showed signs of binding, and large and small bruises and wounds were found throughout the body. I wonder who really did this terrible thing. Police urgently arrested friends Kim and Ahn, who lived with the victim, as suspects.
◇ Jung Tae-geun: Did your friends do that?
◆ Kim Hee-eun: The victim, Kim, and Ahn are both from Daegu, and Kim and Ahn became friends at the academy when they were in middle school, and the victim knew Ahn through Kim as a high school classmate. The victim considered Kim and Ahn to be friends, but considering what Kim and Ahn did to the victim, it seems that Kim and Ahn did not think so.
◇ Jung Tae-geun: What do you mean by threatening the victims' families?
◆ Kim Hee-eun: The perpetrators went to the victim's house, broke the laptop, and threatened the victim's parents by telling the victim's family that he had received from the victim. The victim's family, who were threatened for two days, reported it to the police, who warned the perpetrators at the time to "civilize a friend" and "don't go to the victim's house." Later in the investigation, the perpetrators' claims that the victim damaged the laptop were confirmed as lies. The perpetrators threatened victims with poor cognitive abilities to write false debt repayment contracts and even assaulted them with vacuum cleaners and mobile phones.
◇ Jung Tae-geun: And yet we lived together.
◆ Kim Hee-eun: The way the victim got to know the perpetrators, Kim and Ahn, goes back to around middle school. Those I met in middle school were not just friends, but perpetrators and victims of school violence. The victim was a victim of school violence, and the degree of violence was very serious, and he was even driven into the changing room and sexually harassed, and the perpetrators removed the victim's pants and sent them to Internet broadcasts. However, the bullying went into a lull due to the teacher's restraint at the time, but after that, the victim got to know Kim and Ahn. Kim and Ahn seem to have started approaching the victim by pretending to open the door of their hearts. The victim regarded them as friends, but in fact, they were also perpetrators, and for them, the victim was nothing but a pushover. However, the victim had already reached a state where he could not even think of what he was doing as harm and damage.
◆ Kim Hee-eun: Kim approached Park by digging into the weaknesses of the victim Park, who was a victim of school violence when he was in high school, and by doing so, he began to mentally dominate the victim and established a vertical subordinate relationship. The victim, Kim, and Ahn lived in an officetel in Yeongdeungpo before moving to Mapo. According to the manager of Yeongdeungpo officetel, who often watched them, Kim and Ahn wore warm clothes in winter, but the victim was wearing the same short-sleeved T-shirts. In January 2020, the owner of the convenience store found that the victim had eaten coke without permission at a convenience store near Seocho, and the owner, who felt that the victim had been victimized by violence, handed over the case to the police.
◇ Jung Tae-geun: Why did you steal the drink? Did your friends order this, too?
◆ [Kim Hee-eun] I think it was because I was hungry. My father was surprised to see the victim's condition and asked the hospital for a checkup. The victim was found to have weakened bones due to external force, and the father persuaded his son to tell him the truth. In the end, the victim threatened to kill Kim and Ahn if they didn't come to Seoul and said various assaults, and the father filed a complaint with the police against the perpetrators.
◇ Jeong Tae-geun: I think it's a little late, but I'm glad that the family found out and proceeded with the complaint.
◆ Kim Hee-eun: When the victim's family sued Ahn and Kim for injury, they took the victim in their hometown to an officetel in Seoul in late March 2021 for retaliation and extortion. The victim then wrote a letter of cancellation of the complaint and sent a text message to the police saying that the complaint was canceled.
◇ Jung Tae-geun: Something is unclear.
◆ Kim Hee-eun: The victim's father confirmed the victim's damage around the end of 2020 and sued the perpetrator, but the police ended the investigation with insufficient evidence. The perpetrators were found to have urged the victim to lie when he spoke to a police officer who had been reported missing by his family and forced him to write a written cancellation of the complaint.
◇ Jeong Tae-geun: My father knew what was going on. And yet the victim couldn't get out of the terrible situation?
◆ Kim Hee-eun: In July 2020, the victim living in Daegu received a card from his father saying he had to go to Seoul and followed Kim and Ahn to Seoul. Mr. Park traveled from place to place in Seoul while being dragged by Mr. Kim and Mr. Ahn, and came home briefly in October and was re-appointed. The victim's father reported his son's disappearance to the police station, but later lifted the report when he called saying the victim was doing well. However, there were more than one or two strange things. Several mobile phones were opened in the victim's name.
◇ Jung Tae-geun: Why were there many cell phones?
◆ Kim Hee-eun: Kim and Ahn opened several mobile phones in the victim's name, and then pulled out the mobile phone fee opened in the victim's name up to the limit of each mobile phone and used it as living expenses. When the victim's father noticed that the card price was unusually high and reduced the card limit to 1 million won, the criminals changed their method to mobile phone payment. It wasn't just food that Kim and Ahn bought by extorting the victim, but they matched the game assembly computer with the money extorted from their mobile phone bills as well as sophisticated costumes and titles. Since April 2021, they have felt limited in extorting their mobile phone bills and bought gift cards with the money they extorted to cash in.
◇ Jung Tae-geun: That's really the worst.
◆ Kim Hee-eun: What's worse is that the perpetrators continued to film the victims bullying them, and they also showed weirdness in filming the abuse with cell phone cameras. And when I checked the victim's phone history, since April, only strange contacts have been taken without contacting family members, and these were the contacts of the loan company. The criminals made the victim go into debt. It was so terrible that the so-called mobile phone hopping method, which mainly used cannon phones, was used.
◇ Jung Tae-geun: I don't think we could have asked anyone around for help, but it's really a shame.
◆ Kim Hee-eun: I think it can be explained by a state of low self-esteem and a lot of contraction, that is, learned lethargy. The victim probably tried to get out of the situation several times but failed several times and fell into the situation. The victim's father contacted Cha because he remembered that the victim and his high school classmate Cha went to Ulsan to get a job in the early days of his visit to Seoul when the victim lost contact after moving to Seoul. The father called Mr. Cha to send his son back because he had to go back to school, but Mr. Cha had never met Mr. Park after he was discharged from the military. However, Cha contacted Park's father to indirectly convey Kim's explanation. Mr. Kim approached Mr. Cha with the justification that Mr. Park would spill a drink on our laptop and damage it, so he would have to scold him a little, so he approached him. Later, Cha said he thought Kim's words were true at the time, so he was asked to do so, and he didn't know that things would get that big.
◇ Jeong Tae-geun: So he ended up dying after suffering from the perpetrators for so long.
◆ Kim Hee-eun: The perpetrators continued to abuse the victims, eventually leading to their deaths. Experts expressed that the victim was slowly dying. The victim weighed 52 kilograms before being taken away by the perpetrators, but at the time of his death, he was in serious geometric condition, weighing 34 kilograms. The victim was placed in a long period of starvation and was forced to cut off food supplies, and pneumonia, one of the causes of death, was also caused by the perpetrators forcibly binding the victim for a long period of time. According to the prosecution, Kim and Ahn tormented the victim in brutal ways, such as restricting meals and spraying water without sleeping after tying the victim's body with a cable tie for about three months before he died. In the end, when the victim collapsed due to poor health, he locked himself in the bathroom and continued to abuse.
◇ Jeong Tae-geun: He would have been put on trial.
◆ Kim Hee-eun: The perpetrators were charged with retaliatory murder, retaliatory imprisonment, joint injury, joint blackmail, and joint coercion under the Act on Aggravated Punishment of Specific Crimes, etc., and the prosecutor sought life imprisonment.
◇ Jung Tae-geun: What was the result?
◆ Kim Hee-eun: On December 21, 2021, the first trial sentenced each to 30 years in prison and ordered the attachment of electronic devices for 10 years. According to the ruling, the defendants said, "The victim is not human, so it would be unfair if he was punished for dying." Cha, who was accused of aiding and abetting their crimes, was sentenced to 10 months in prison and two years of probation.
◇ Jeong Tae-geun: The perpetrators are the perpetrators, but the police reported their father's disappearance and even filed a complaint. I think that if these parts were handled properly, it might not have led to a death case.
◆ Kim Hee-eun: This tragedy is also due to the police's poor investigation. The victim's father confirmed the victim's damage around the end of 2020 and sued the perpetrator, but Yeongdeungpo Police Station ended the investigation with insufficient evidence, which eventually developed into a murder case. On top of that, even though the victim's father reported him missing twice after the victim was kidnapped, the police were unable to return the missing person to the family's arms. The police confirmed it only by phone, but the victim was in one place with the perpetrators, so they could not properly ask for help. After that, he was eventually found guilty and suspended the investigator for two months, and the examination officer was given an unwritten warning to the chief of the reprimand department.
◇ Jung Tae-geun: Incident X File That's all we prepared for today. You all deserve to be defended. Incident X file, thank you everyone.
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