Category: crime & punishment

Who knew siphoning off school lunch food could be so lucrative?:

A private high school in Seoul allegedly served terrible meals to students, and 18 people, including the principal, are accused of embezzling about 400 million won ($343,000) from the lunch budget.

The Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education revealed on Sunday the result of three inspections of Choongam High School’s school meal system from May to August this year.

“We’ve found problems in the school meal system and evidence of embezzlement that adds up to at least 410 million won,” the education office said. “We’ve reported 18 people, including the principal, administrative officer and school meal subcontractors, to the prosecution and requested some of them be sacked.”

The school has been criticized for terrible food, and its vice principal openly scolded students who did not pay for meals.

A teacher said in a radio interview that the school did not replace cooking oil until it turned black and fried dishes sometimes had black powder on them.

The school is suspected to have tried to cover up the facts when the education office was about to start its inspection in May.

According to an education office inspection report acquired by the JoongAng Ilbo, a subcontractor who delivered food to the school was told to “only talk about the business and tell nothing about other affairs when the education office calls” by a former executive of the school meal subcontractor.

“Employees of subcontractors did not properly answer questions,” an official of the inspector’s office said, “and they appeared to be hiding something.” [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read the rest at the link.

Another month and more dead Koreans found in the Philippines:

Another Korean couple was shot to death in the Philippines, confirmed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Seoul on Friday, again in the coastal province of Cavite, 21 kilometers (13 miles) south of Manila. A middle-aged man was shot by an unidentified assailant on the road right outside the couple’s residence early Friday morning, according to the Korean Foreign Ministry. His wife was shot inside the house, where she was discovered dead.

The man, reported to be a 54-year-old surnamed Lee, held Korean nationality. However, his wife, a 47-year-old surnamed Park, was an ethnic Korean with Chinese nationality.

Park called the local police at around 1:30 a.m., which is likely around the time the shooting began. Philippine police are still investigating the fatal shootings to confirm details. Cavite is the same province in which a 64-year-old Korean man surnamed Na and his 60-year-old wife Kim were shot to death in their retirement home by an unidentified gunman on Aug. 19.

Police have yet to find a lead on that case, which was suspected to be an armed robbery. This brings the number of Koreans killed in the Philippines this year to 10, including Korean-Chinese Park, raising questions about how to bolster security for Koreans residing in or traveling to the Southeast Asian country.   [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read the rest at the link.

A police officer stands outside the entrance of an indoor shooting range in the southern port city of Busan on Oct. 3, 2015, after a man stabbed the owner and fled with a .45-caliber handgun and around 30 to 40 bullets. (Yonhap)

It is good this guy was caught and sentenced, but how stupid and gullible are the victims to fall for this scam?:

A former Camp Stanley employee has been sentenced to five years in prison for fraud and related charges after selling nonexistent base jobs to more than two dozen South Koreans.

The employee, surnamed Gang, worked more than 20 years in the Uijeongbu-area base, most recently as an ambulance driver, before being fired in March over the allegations.

Gang used a U.S. soldier who was unaware of the scam to interview Koreans by phone to test their English, South Korean police said. More than 30 victims paid him a total of $750,000 for the fake jobs over six and a half years, according to sentencing documents from the Anyang branch of the Suwon District Court.

Gang was also convicted of counterfeiting documents and circulating forged documents. He wrote 11 false letters of employment, using a computer at a U.S. military medical facility in Uijeongbu to produce at least one of the letters.

Among his victims was a woman who paid Gang 25 million won (almost $21,500) in 2013, believing she was securing a civilian job for her son with U.S. Forces Korea. Another woman, police said, paid Gang 100 million won (about $86,000) for administrative jobs for her husband, son and daughter. Gang promised some of his victims he would pay the human resources manager at an Army hospital, and their jobs would be guaranteed until retirement at age 68.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read the rest at the link.

Corruption investigations have led to a large number of Koreans killing themselves to include 15 people so far this year:

The apparent suicide of a researcher after being interrogated about defense corruption is shedding light on prosecutorial investigations that lead to suicides of suspects or witnesses.

A 43-year-old senior researcher, surnamed Kim, who worked at weapons supplier LIG Nex1 was found dead Monday on the ground outside an apartment building in Osan, Gyeonggi. He was living in an apartment on the 23rd floor. The police are investigating how he died.

Kim was questioned by a joint government investigative team on defense ministry corruption led by prosecutors, military prosecutors, the Board of Audit and Inspection and the National Tax Service. Prosecutors suspected his involvement in corruption regarding the development of Hyeongung, a mid-range personal guided missile.  (…….)

According to New Politics Alliance for Democracy Rep. Lee Sang-min, the number of people who committed suicide after being questioned by the prosecution, either as suspects or witnesses, was 79 between 2010 and June this year. Last year, 21 people committed suicide, and 15 died this year up to June.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read the rest at the link.

Some people are just nuts and need to be locked away for good like this woman:

A woman who allegedly killed her five-year-old son in Gyeonngi Province was arrested Monday.

The woman, 38, identified only as “A,” allegedly drowned her son in a bathtub at her house on Sept. 10. Police said the boy was gagged and his hands tied.

The mother changed her son’s clothes after killing him and laid him in her room to cover up the crime.

“B”‘s older sister found the body and called police. Police said the mother first told them the boy had died suddenly in his sleep, but then claimed he had drowned while playing in the tub by himself.

After checking CCTV footage near her house, police found that the mother had forced her son into house. They also found duct tape, allegedly used in the killing, in the house.

Police said the mother told them she killed her son because he was fond of her husband, who did not get along with her. [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link.

Korea Bang has the translation of an SBS report that researches whether a mother and her two sons were raped and kept as sex slaves.  It is a very odd story that features domestic violence, a religious cult, claims of drugged fueled orgies, rape, and even a mysterious shaman:

On October 29th, 2014, a woman in her 40s and her two sons held a press conference. The title was “Press conference to demand thorough investigation of Mr. Heo and his father’s sexual crimes”. She mainly claimed that her husband, Pastor Heo, her father-in-law and her own parents’ family members all worked together to rape her and her sons. She even claimed that they had had orgies.

Lee: “Would you believe my sons and I had sex with my husband and father-in-law? But it really happened. Sometimes, my father-in-law brought a dozen of his believers. On such a day, we would have an orgy.” (The older son and younger son will be called by false names Junho and Junsu hereafter.)  [Korea Bang]

Read the whole thing at the link.

The murder of Koreans in the Philippines continues:

A South Korean couple living in the Philippines were found dead in their home apparently by gun-inflicted wounds, the foreign ministry said Wednesday.

The bodies of the husband and wife, both in their 60s, were found at around 7 a.m. local time by a neighbor inside their homes located in a village south of Manila, the ministry said.

The two, only identified by their surname Na and Kim, reportedly had gun-inflicted wounds in their necks and chests with their bodies lying in the living room.

Local police suspect armed robbery as the motive but are still considering the possibility of murder driven by personal grudge.

The couple reportedly settled down in the Philippines seven years ago after retirement.  [Yonhap]

Here is another one of those reports that a lot of resources is spent on to confirm the obvious:

When Lee Tae-ho, a social worker at the National Child Protection Agency, last year visited a 7-year-old at his home upon request from his school teacher, nothing seemed too out of place at first.

“My mother drinks a lot of water when she’s eating,” the child told him about his single mother.

It didn’t take long for Lee to realize that the “water” was in fact the colorless Korean alcoholic beverage soju.

Unemployed and depressed since her bitter divorce, the mother would drink about 20 bottles of soju a week, and would fail to provide basic care for her young children. The boy and his sister, 6, would skip dinner most days. A number of times, the suicidal mother asked them if it “would be better if they all killed themselves together.”

As a social worker working for a state-run agency, Lee said he has personally witnessed many domestic violence abusers with drinking problems.

Lee’s observation was demonstrated in a recent study, which found a significant connection between alcohol abuse and domestic and sexual violence in South Korea.

The scholarly article from Dongguk University, which surveyed 4,851 arrested individuals for violent crimes last year, showed that 73.1 percent of the domestic violence abusers and 67.9 percent of sex offenders committed their offenses while under the influence of alcohol.  [Korea Herald]

You can read more at the link, but one thing of interest in the report is that the researchers recommend that the system of giving more lenient punishment for crimes in Korea for being drunk needs to end.  The researchers believe that people with a history of drinking problems should instead get heavier punishments.

1967 is when the first US-South Korea Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) was signed which handed over legal jurisdiction of crimes committed by US troops while off duty to the Korean authorities.  The most serious case that was first tried in a Korean court involving a US servicemember was the 1967 murder of Chun-ja Kim by Private Eugene D. Taylor.  Taylor was a cook assigned to Headquarters Company, 2nd Battalion, 31st Infantry Regiment, 7th Infantry DIvision.  Taylor was just days away from completing his tour of duty in Korea when he arrested for the murder of his Korean girlfriend on November 5, 1967.

From the November 27, 1967 edition of the Stars & Stripes.

Before redeploying to the US, Pvt. Taylor decided to go on a drunken bender at his girlfriend’s residence.  For some reason during his drunken bender he decided to strangle and kill his Korean girlfriend, Chun-ja Kim that he supposedly had plans to return to Korea to marry.  He committed this murder two days before redeploying to the US.  This just shows that even back in the 1960’s soldiers at high risk of getting in trouble are those within 30 days of going home.  It also shows that the old Korean complaint of GIs committing crimes in Korea and then getting away with them by flying back to the US was also not true back then.

From the February 8, 1968 edition of the Stars & Stripes.

The landlord of the home that Ms. Kim lived at discovered the body in the morning along with Taylor bleeding with a neck wound.  He claims that when he woke up and discovered Kim’s dead body that he tried to commit suicide by slashing his neck with a piece of broken glass.  It appears he was drunk enough to kill someone else, but not drunk enough to kill himself.

From the March 7, 1968 edition of the Stars & Stripes.

Ultimately Pvt Taylor was convicted of the murder of Ms. Kim and sentenced to 8 years in a Korean prison.  It seems like a pretty lenient sentence, but the Korean court took into consideration the mitigating circumstances of him being a soldier deployed to defend Korea and the fact he was drunk.  So being drunk back in the 60’s was considered a mitigating circumstance just like it is today in Korean courts.

From the April 11, 1968 edition of the Stars & Stripes.

Taylor’s crime is now long forgotten in the dustbins of USFK history, but he does have the dubious distinction of being the first American servicemember convicted and sentenced for murder in a South Korean court.  This case shows that US servicemembers were held accountable for the crimes in Korean courts back then and continue to be held accountable today.

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