An Auckland mother who murdered her son and daughter before hiding their bodies in suitcases has been sentenced to at least 17 years’ jail.<\/p>\n
Hakyung Lee was found\u00a0guilty of murdering her children\u00a0Yuna Jo and Minu Jo, at her trial by jury earlier this year.<\/p>\n
She concealed their bodies inside suitcases, hidden inside a storage locker, before leaving the country.<\/p>\n
The children were discovered almost four years later after the contents of the locker was bought in an online auction.<\/p>\n
At her sentencing on Wednesday, she was handed a sentence of life imprisonment with a minimum non-parole period of 17 years.<\/p>\n
Lee sat in the dock, silent, with her head hung low, as she had done throughout her trial.<\/p>\n
Lee represented herself in court during the trial. But the 45-year-old watched it unfold from a separate courtroom at the High Court at Auckland, aided by her interpreter.<\/p>\n
Her standby counsel, Chris Wilkinson-Smith and Lorraine Smith, claimed the death of her husband, Ian Jo, in 2017 started a “deep descent” into mental illness which made her irrationally believe the only answer was to kill the children and then herself.<\/p>\n
The Crown’s position was Lee understood what she was doing and knew it was wrong.<\/p>\n
Crown prosecutor Natalie Walker argued Lee’s actions following the deaths of her children, including hiding their bodies and moving to South Korea, were calculated.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, the court heard a statement from Lee’s mother, Choon Ja Lee, read aloud by a Crown lawyer in Korean and English.<\/p>\n
She described the anguish after learning what had happened to her grandchildren<\/p>\n
“It felt like a pain that cut through my bones, or as if someone were gauging out my chest,” she said.<\/p>\n
“I wanted to be free from suffering, but I had no one to lean on.”<\/p>\n
Choon Ja Lee said she had trouble sleeping, turning to alcohol to help.<\/p>\n
She said she was ostracised by her church community after news broke of her daughter’s actions.<\/p>\n
“The treatment I received was unexpectedly cold, they did not welcome me but avoided me and I was met only with glances that showed they did not wish to speak to me,” she said.<\/p>\n
“I came to the realisation that among the church members I had been labelled as the mother of a murderer.”<\/p>\n
Choon Ja Lee’s husband passed away, and her son-in-law moved to Australia where the two lost contact.<\/p>\n
It got so bad, Choon Ja Lee said, she considered suicide.<\/p>\n
“With no one to rely on I had thoughts of ending my life countless times,” Choon Ja Lee said.<\/p>\n
Choon Ja Lee spoke about the regret she felt in the wake of the murders, and how she wished she had acted sooner.<\/p>\n
She said she deeply regretted not taking her daughter to a counsellor introduced to her by a friend.<\/p>\n
“I keep thinking that if I had taken her at that time, this tragedy might have been prevented.”<\/p>\n
Despite it all, Choon Ja Lee said she still hoped her daughter would be eventually released from prison on parole.<\/p>\n
Ian Jo’s brother, Jimmy Sei Wook Jo, was present in the courtroom, but also had his statement read aloud by a lawyer.<\/p>\n
“This situation is something I would expect to read about in a novel, or watch in a TV series,” he said.<\/p>\n
“I never imagined such a profound tragedy would ever befall our family.”<\/p>\n
Jo said he found it difficult to be near Asian children the same age as Minu and Yuna.<\/p>\n
“When I see them I feel overwhelmed, as though they will ask me ‘why didn’t you stop this?'”<\/p>\n
He carried a heavy, agonising guilt, he said.<\/p>\n
Jo said he dared not tell his own mother about what happened, for fear it would kill her.<\/p>\n
Walker pointed to the children’s age and vulnerability as factors setting a minimum sentence, describing it as a gross breach of trust.<\/p>\n
“Being only 6 and 8 at the time they were killed, their vulnerability was heightened by the fact that it was their sole surviving parent who killed them, having recently lost their father.”<\/p>\n
She proposed a minimum of 20 to 22 years in prison.<\/p>\n
Wilkinson-Smith opened his submissions by saying he did not want to underplay the enormity of what Lee had done.<\/p>\n
He said Lee lived in a world of shame for, effectively, the worst crime a mother could commit.<\/p>\n
“She’s shunned by her own community, she’s threatened, and taunted, and ridiculed in prison,” he said.<\/p>\n
Justice Venning went through Lee’s background, and the timeline leading up to the children’s death.<\/p>\n
He said Lee’s mental health played a major part of the case.<\/p>\n
An updated psychiatric report had been carried out before sentencing, which indicated Lee was likely suffering from an atypical depression and prolonged grief reaction at the time of the murders.<\/p>\n
Justice Venning concluded Lee killed her children because she could not cope with the burden and responsibility of caring for them after her husband’s death, influenced by her depression.<\/p>\n
“You relied heavily on him during your marriage, you could not cope when he became seriously unwell, and perhaps you could not bear to have the children around you as a constant reminder of your former happy life, which had been cruelly taken from you.”<\/p>\n
Justice Venning ruled Lee be sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum non-parole period of 17 years, but ordered she be treated as a special patient under the Criminal Procedure Mentally Impaired Persons Act.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An Auckland mother who murdered her son and daughter before hiding their bodies in suitcases has been sentenced…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":154712,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-154711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154711\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/154712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}