Category: crime & punishment

This has to horrible news to the residents of this apartment who have been using the tap water contaminated with a decomposed corpse:

A body was found in a water tank on the roof of an apartment block in Gumi, North Gyeongsang Province, local daily Kyunghyang Shinmun reported Tuesday.

Management staff at the apartments in Gongdan-dong found the body of a 38-year-old Chinese at 1:30 p.m. Monday after a resident complained that the tap water had a bad smell.

“The body had no particular injuries,” police said. “The Chinese is presumed to have been dead for two weeks.”

Police are investigating and an autopsy will be held Wednesday.

Gumi City has provided bottles of mineral water to apartment residents as an emergency measure. [Korea Times]

It looks like this so called Kenyan refugee will be having an extended stay in Korea after committing this brutal murder of a PC bang employee:

An African man who has applied for refugee status killed an employee at a PC cafe in Gwangju on Wednesday, and then robbed a customer.

The man, 28, a Kenyan, whose name has not been released, went to the cafe in South Jeolla Province in the morning. He chatted with an employee, a Korean man, 38.

The otherwise empty cafe’s security camera showed the two chatting briefly before going to a washroom in the basement.

The camera then shows the Kenyan returning to the cafe alone.

The man then robbed a male customer, 22, stealing his winter jacket and smartphone, and then fled. The customer reported the theft to police, who later arrested the Kenyan.

Police found the cafe employee dead in the washroom, with a chopstick and spoon jammed in his mouth. [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link.

This is a pretty brutal murder that happened recently in Gwangju where two siblings upset with their father decided to brutally kill him with a screwdriver and knife:

A recent case of parricide in Gwangju, in which a brother and sister allegedly stabbed their father in the heart and neck, has received more than the usual amount of media attention this week because of the day the siblings chose.

A 47-year-old woman and her 43-year-old brother were arrested for allegedly killing their father on Sunday, when the rest of the nation was celebrating Parents’ Day. The victim was 76.

Gwangju police say the siblings have admitted to killing their father on Sunday, but they don’t believe their professed reason.

The suspects have asserted under questioning that they have been deeply upset with their father over the past two decades because of his ill treatment of their mother, who passed away in 2011 after years of suffering from mental and physical illnesses.

The mother was disabled in a car accident in the 1990s and suffered from dementia before she died, the police quoted the siblings as saying.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read the rest at the link as well as over at the Korea Herald.

This is horrible way to lose a son, to a toxic humidifier:

A South Korean father who claims to have lost his son to a harmful Oxy Reckitt Benckiser humidifier sterilizer said Saturday he will file a compensation suit against the British company later this month.

Kim Deok-jong, 40, said he decided to file the damage suit against the British company after CEO Rakesh Kapoor refused his demand to visit South Korea to make an apology in front of the sterilizer’s victims. His 5-year-old son died in 2009 after battling a respiratory disease.

His legal representative will notify Oxy of his intention to file for a compensation claim next week, a preliminary process needed to proceed with a formal suit.  (………)

A criminal suit will be possible after South Korean prosecutors announce its investigation results, which would provide the legal grounds that Oxy headquarters approved sales of the harmful product in the Korean market.  (…………)

The humidifier disinfectant case, one of the worst scandals involving a consumer product using chemicals, came to light after four pregnant women died of lung problems for unknown reasons in 2011. A government-led investigation confirmed a connection between more than 100 people who died of lung problems and the chemicals used to clean household humidifiers.

The focus of the investigation will be on whether the company’s high-ranking executives approved the sales of its disinfectants while knowing the health risks.  [Korea Herald]

You can read more at the link.

Three British males are in big trouble after allegedly sexually assaulting two Korean women and then beating up a bystander that tried to intervene in Itaewon:

Apparently 3 British foreigners were sexually harrassing and assaulting 2 girls and a passerby dude stepped in to intervene.

But he ended up being beaten.

Seems like they’re being investigated but released from jail.  [Reddit Korea via KBS and Naver]

You can read more at the link.

A bunch of 2nd Infantry Division soldiers have apparently made themselves eligible for Army downsizing after being punished for the brawl they were part of at the UN Club in Itaewon:

The Army has punished nine soldiers for a brawl in Seoul’s Itaewon entertainment district, a 2nd Infantry Division spokesman said Tuesday.

 

Video that has been circulating on social media since shortly after the January fight shows a group of foreigners brawling in the street in front of the UN Club, a nightspot popular with U.S. troops that’s a few minutes’ walk from Yongsan Garrison, headquarters of 8th Army and U.S. Forces Korea.

 

The brawl involved both men and women trading punches and wrestling on the ground, oblivious to the efforts of a lone, bespectacled South Korean police officer to bring the situation under control with a glowing-red traffic wand.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read the rest at the link, but here is the Youtube video of the brawl, what disgrace:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEtOGx1PDSc

After all the inaccurate reporting by the Associated Press over the No Gun Ri issue in South Korea I keep a healthy bit of skepticism when reading an article like this.  There is probably some truth to this especially considering the sexual assaults against deaf students at the Gwangju Inwha School that were uncovered a few years ago.  However, how much truth there is to this story I just don’t know.  What I do find interesting is how in the Korean media little is being mentioned about this story that is making huge headlines in the US:

The 14-year-old boy in the black school jacket stared at his shoes, his heart pounding, as the policeman accused him of stealing a piece of bread.

Even now, more than 30 years later, Choi Seung-woo weeps when he describes all that happened next.

The policeman yanked down the boy’s pants and sparked a cigarette lighter near Choi’s genitals until he confessed to a crime he didn’t commit.

Then two men with clubs came and dragged Choi off to the Brothers Home, a mountainside institution where some of the worst human rights atrocities in modern South Korean history took place.

A guard in Choi’s dormitory raped him that night in 1982 – and the next, and the next. So began five hellish years of slave labour and near-daily assaults, years in which Choi saw men and women beaten to death, their bodies carted away like garbage.

Choi was one of thousands – the homeless, the drunk, but mostly children and the disabled – rounded up off the streets ahead of the 1988 Seoul Olympics, which the ruling dictators saw as international validation of South Korea’s arrival as a modern country.

An Associated Press investigation shows that the abuse of these so-called vagrants at Brothers, the largest of dozens of such facilities, was much more vicious and widespread than previously known, based on hundreds of exclusive documents and dozens of interviews with officials and former inmates.  [Associated Press]

You can read the rest at the link.

People should be careful who they meet up with through Kakao:

A Korean man in his 20s got arrested for having multiple sexual activities with underage girls that he met through the social network.

Anaheim police department arrested a Korean man Mr. Kim last 29th of March for having sexual relationships and raping teen girls.

According to the Anaheim police, Kim contacted a 13-year-old girl through messaging app on the phone in 2014.

Kim then met the teen girl at a shopping mall in Irvine and took her to his house in La Habra and raped her.

The Anaheim police officers started sting operation and engaged in social network with Mr. Kim, disguised as the girl. Kim, thinking the officers were teenage girl, sent photos of his private body parts and offered her to have sexual activities.

Kim went out to the park in Anaheim not realizing the girl was actually the police officer and was arrested.  [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link.

Here is another example of a race baiting article being pushed by the media insinuating that the poor black soldier in this article that could not afford an attorney is some how getting treated unfairly compared to the white soldier who’s family could afford a civilian attorney.  The article claims they committed similar crimes and received very different sentences.  However, upon closer scrutiny the two crimes were very different and tried in different court systems thus different outcomes not that facts matter in click bait articles like this:

Two soldiers from the same Joint Base Lewis-McChord infantry battalion experienced two very different kinds of justice when they came home from training events a year apart and carried out deadly crimes.

Pvt. Jeremiah Hill, prosecuted in Army court, received a sentence of 45 years in prison for knifing another soldier in the heart on a Lakewood street.

The rookie soldier from a poor Chicago family had an Army-provided defense attorney and rarely showed remorse when he testified.

Spc. Skylar Nemetz, prosecuted in Pierce County Superior Court, last week received a sentence of less than 14 years for causing the death of his wife, Danielle, when he accidentally shot her in the head with a rifle.

His Northern California family reached deep into their savings to hire an experienced private attorney. Nemetz wept on the witness stand and persuaded a jury he didn’t mean to kill his wife.

The disparities in outcomes for two soldiers from the 5th Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment show the differences in what can happen when the Army and Pierce County carry out their informal agreement to decide which agency should prosecute soldiers who commit crimes outside of JBLM. [News Tribune]

You can read the rest at the link to learn the details of each case.