Mother suspected of killing daughter, burying body

Police officers search for a seven-year-old girl’s body, which her mother allegedly buried in 2011 after beating her to death, on a mountain in Gwangju, Gyeonggi Province, Monday. / Yonhap

By Kim Se-jeong

A woman, who was arrested Saturday for not sending her nine-year-old daughter to school for a year, has confessed to beating her other seven-year-old daughter to death and burying the body in Gyeonggi Province.

Police recovered the girl’s remains on Monday.

This is the third case of suspected child abuse resulting in death involving parents since the police in December began a nationwide investigation into children who have been absent from school for a long time or who have not attended school even though they are of school age.

Officials at Goseong Police Station in South Gyeongsang Province said on Monday that they had initially asked the prosecution to seek an arrest warrant for the 42-year-old woman, surnamed Park, on charges of negligence and that a local court issued this on Saturday. Once in custody, Park told police that she had beaten one of her daughters to death.

Two of Park’s friends, surnamed Baek and Lee, 42 and 45, were also arrested Monday for allegedly abusing the girl and helping the mother bury the girl’s body. Another, surnamed Lee, 50, was booked without physical detention. All the suspects are women.

According to police, Park left her husband in January 2009 and lived at Lee’s apartment in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province, where the four adults and their six children lived together, until 2015 when she moved to Cheonan, South Chungcheong Province.

Park confessed that she starved the girl as punishment for not listening to her.

On Oct. 26, 2011, Park allegedly tied her daughter up in the apartment veranda as punishment for damaging furniture. She beat her for about 30 minutes together with the friends, and left her there, until 5 p.m. the next day, when they found her dead.

Park and her accomplices allegedly stored the corpse in their vehicle for about two days and buried the body in a remote part of Gwangju, Gyeonggi Province.

At around 5:30 p.m. on Monday, police officers found the remains suspected of being those of the daughter, following a search conducted with two of the adult accomplices, Baek and Lee.

The adults in this group also allegedly abused the other children often, forcing Baek’s son to stay in the veranda for days.

The education authorities, along with the police, have been tracking down children who are missing from school. The Goseong police were in charge of the case of Park’s children as their residence was registered there.

She told police that she was not sending her daughter to school out of fear of getting caught by money lenders because she was heavily in debt and on the run from them.

But when asked about her older daughter, Park told the police that the girl went missing from an apartment playground in Nowon, Seoul, in 2009. Suspicious that the mother did not report the child as missing to police, officers questioned her closely, which led to her confession regarding her daughter’s death back in 2011.

The nationwide investigation was started in December following the discovery of an 11-year-old girl who had been starved and abused by her father, who prevented her from attending school for more than three years.

So far, the investigation has already exposed two other cases of children who had been beaten to death by their parents, one a seven-year-old boy and the other a 13-year-old girl. Both had long-term absences from school.