The Korean police recently issued an official sentence to the defendants involved in the case of exchanging two 3-year-old girls, one dead and the other missing.
According to Yonhap, in February 2021, the body of a 3-year-old girl was found in a decomposed state at an apartment in Gumi city. Autopsy results showed that the girl had been locked up and starved to death for six months before.
The first person to discover the body of a 3-year-old girl was Mrs. Seok – her grandmother. As soon as they received the information, the police conducted a search for Ms. Seok’s daughter, Ms. Kim. When arrested, Ms. Kim said that she had divorced the girl’s father, abandoned the baby since August 2020 to go to a new man.
Up to the time Ms. Kim was arrested, the circumstances of the case were still very simple and nothing unusual. But when the girl’s DNA test results were announced, everyone was shocked.
According to the DNA test results, Ms. Kim is not the biological mother of the unfortunate girl, but her sister. The biological mother of the 3-year-old girl is Mrs. Seok. More importantly, neither the ex-husband nor the current husband of Mrs. Seok is the father of the baby girl. Until now, authorities have not been able to determine who the biological father of the dead girl is.
Realizing the anomaly, the Korean police rushed to investigate with Ms. Seok. Prosecutors’ records show that Ms. Seok and Ms. Kim gave birth together around April 2018. Mrs. Seok then swapped the two children with each other, the purpose was for Ms. Kim to raise her biological child. In the end, a 3-year-old girl was starved to death, the other girl (Miss Kim’s child) remains unknown.
At the trial on August 17, 2021, Ms. Seok still denied that she was the biological mother of the unlucky girl, saying that the DNA test results were incorrect. However, the 50-year-old woman was still charged with abandoning her daughter’s body and kidnapping her granddaughter, an initial sentence of eight years in prison.
In the appeal court on February 2, 2023, the Daegu district court shortened her sentence to 2 years in prison and 3 years of probation. According to the judge of the trial, the DNA test results might not prove that Seok had swapped her daughter and daughter.
As for Ms. Kim, this woman was sentenced to 20 years in prison for leaving her sister to die. In addition, she was also forced to attend a psychotherapy course related to child abuse.
