Woman gets life in prison for killing her two children
In New Zealand, a mother who killed her two children and hid their bodies in suitcases was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Hakyung Lee, who was found guilty in September of the shocking murders of eight-year-old Yuna Jo and six-year-old Minu Jo, had to spend at least 17 years behind bars before being eligible for parole.
Lee, 45, pleaded insanity at the time of the murders, which occurred shortly after her husband died in 2018. High Court judge Geoffrey Venning said Lee’s mental health played a part in the case but his actions were calculated.
The child’s remains were only discovered in 2022 by a couple who won an auction for the contents of an abandoned warehouse in Auckland.
During the trial, which lasted more than two weeks, Hakyung Lee’s defense lawyers told the court that after Jo’s death, his mental health deteriorated and he began to believe it was best for the rest of the family to die together.
Lee tried to kill herself and her children by giving her a dose of the antidepressant nortriptyline mixed into fruit juice, but she took the wrong dose and woke up to find her children dead, her lawyers said.
Prosecutors argued Lee’s actions were “a selfish act to relieve himself of the burden of single parenting.”
After the murders, Lee changed his name and left New Zealand. He was arrested in his native South Korea in September 2022 and extradited to New Zealand later that year.
The court heard on Wednesday how the murders had caused pain to the families of Lee and her husband Ian Jo.
Lee’s mother, Choon Ja Lee, said in an emotional statement read by prosecutors that she regretted not taking her daughter to counseling and that Lee “had no will to live” after Jo died of cancer in November 2017.
“If he wanted to die, why didn’t he die alone? Why did he take innocent children with him?” Choon Ja Lee wrote, according to New Zealand media reports.
Jo’s brother Jimmy said he “never imagined such a profound tragedy would befall our family”.
He said that his own mother (Yuna and Minu’s other grandmother) still did not know that they were dead.
“It was my late brother’s will that I protect them,” Jimmy Jo said. “This is a continuing sentence for which I will never be paroled.”
A psychiatric evaluation before sentencing said Lee was likely suffering from “unusual depression” and a prolonged grief response at the time of the murders, local broadcaster RNZ reported.
Judge Venning ordered Lee to be treated as a “special patient” during his detention, given his mental state.
“When you couldn’t handle it [your husband] “You became seriously ill and perhaps could not bear to have children around you as a constant reminder of your former happy life that had been cruelly taken from you,” the judge said.
