Hakyung Lee, the mother of Minu Jo, 6, and Yuna Jo, 8, is charged with their murders.
Photo: Lawrence Smith/ Stuff Pool
A jury has been told traces of an anti-depressant drug was found in the bodies of two children who it is alleged were killed by their mother, and left in suitcases in a storage unit in Auckland.
The trial of Hakyung Lee has opened in the High Court at Auckland on Tuesday, with openings from both the Crown and the defence – with Lee representing herself, but assisted by two lawyers.
The bodies of Minu Jo and Yuna Jo, aged six and eight at the time of their deaths, were found nearly four years after they were killed and were discovered in suitcases after a family bought the contents of an abandoned storage locker in an Auckland auction.
Crown prosecutor Natalie Walker’s opening to the jury took them back to 11 August 2022, when a Clendon couple won an auction of the storage locker’s contents containing furniture and whiteware – only to discover the body of a clothed child after opening a foul smelling suitcase.
Walker said the deaths of the children would not have been discovered had Lee had not run into financial problems and stopped paying for the storage, leading to its auction.
The Crown’s case is that Lee had killed the children between in the middle of 2018, about a year after her husband died of cancer.
A toxicology test of the children found there was a presence of an antidepressant drug in their bodies.
Walker said the pathologist concluded that they died by homicide of unspecified means associated with an antidepressant drug, but could not be certain whether the children died from it or whether they were incapacitated by the drug, and killed by other means.
The levels of the drug inside their bodies also could not be determined due to the passage of time.
The court heard that Lee was prescribed 60 Nortryptoline tablets in August 2017, after telling her GP that she struggled with sleeping.
Walker said Lee accepted having caused the children’s deaths and putting their remains in the suitcases in the storage unit, but the jury’s task would be to decide whether she was insane at the time the children were killed.
She argued that Lee’s actions following the deaths of her children, including hiring a storage unit, moving the bodies, changing her name, and returning to Korea in late July 2018 flying business class – showed that these were the actions of someone who knew what they were doing, and who new that it was wrong.
Stand-by Council Lorrainne Smith who is assisting Lee in her self-representation, told jurors the loss of her husband in 2017 drove Lee to insanity.
“At the time Hakyung Lee killed her children, was she sane or was she insane?,” she asked jurors.
“On behalf of Ms Lee, it will be submitted that at the time she killed her children, she was insane and this should be the verdict in this case,” Smith said.
“She has killed her children, but she is not guilty of murder, by reason of insanity.”
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