American accused of killing 3-year-old Korean adopted son
By Kim Da-ye
Brian Patrick O’Callaghan
Hyunsu O’Callaghan, 3, was born a premature baby weighing only 2.11 kilograms with hydrocephalus. It seemed his disability didn’t bother Brian O’Callaghan and his wife who adopted him from Korea last October.
The couple from Montgomery County, Maryland, wanted Hyunsu so much that they visited Korea three times between August 2012 and October last year to see him while waiting until the tough adoption procedures were completed, according to an official at Holt Children’s Service, an agency that arranged the adoption.
So those who knew the couple’s yearning for a little brother for their seven-year-old son were left shocked and bewildered when the adoptive father was charged with beating the three-year-old boy to death.
Brian O’Callaghan, a 36-year-old former U.S. Marine and now a National Security Agency agent specializing in Korea, was arrested Sunday and charged with first degree murder and child abuse resulting in death, according to Montgomery County Department of Police.
Hyunsu died of injuries on Feb. 3. “The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in the District of Columbia performed an autopsy and determined that the manner of death was homicide by multiple blunt impact injuries,” police said in a statement.
State prosecutor Donna Fenton was quoted by The Washington Post saying at the court, “Basically this child was beaten to death from head to toe.”
Injuries confirmed by an autopsy included a fractured skull, bruises to the forehead and swelling of the brain.
The prosecution has yet to determine the motif behind the alleged murder while O’Callaghan’s lawyer, Steven McCool, denied the charges against his client. The lawyer called his client “a decorated Iraqi war veteran” and said that he is “grieving the loss of his son.”
Holt said that exact cause of Hyunsu’s death is expected to be confirmed in March. The agency remembers the Americans as a couple who genuinely wanted to adopt.
“Only a limited number of children can be adopted by foreign parents, and the O’Callaghan family showed more efforts than others,” the Holt official said.
“For the first year of adoption, we constantly get reports on how children are doing. It’s hard to imagine he would have done it intentionally. We express our condolences and will wait until the exact causes of Hyunsu’s death are found.”
Under the revised adoption law, adoptive parents have to prove that they have no history of any child abuse, domestic violence, sexual violence, and drug and alcohol abuse. The Holt official confirmed that O’Callaghan had no such records and had a respected job as a government official.
On Feb. 2, detectives at the Montgomery County police were notified of the condition of Hyunsu who had been taken to the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington D.C. They learned that the boy sustained abusive head trauma and was recently beaten. Police said that O’Callaghan did not provide any explanation about the child’s injuries to doctors.
O’Callaghan told detectives that Hyunsu slipped in the bathtub and hit his shoulder on the floor after taking a shower.
According to a court affidavit, O’Callaghan laid his son down for a nap on Feb. 1 but he did not wake up after two hours and he found mucus on the boy’s nose, then he decided to take him to an emergency center as he was unresponsive.
McCool and the Major Crimes Division of the Montgomery County Police were not immediately available for comments.