Abusive murder of uncle and nephew in Yongin, South Korea, 2021

 On February 8, 2021, an incident occurred in Yongin, Gyeonggi-do, where an 8-year-old girl died as a result of abuse by her aunt and uncle.

The victim's biological mother divorced her husband and left her daughter (the victim) in the care of her aunt and her husband, who lived in their apartment in Gorim-dong, Chaein-gu, since around December 2020. However, the couple extremely abused the victim in their care.

After brutally assaulting the victim with blunt objects such as fly swatters and brooms because she was possessed (the couple were shamans), unable to cover her feces, or mumbling unintelligible words, the perpetrators tortured the victim, who had fractured ribs and was unable to move, by restraining her with clotheslines, a furoshiki, and plastic bags, filling a bathtub with water, forcibly submerging the victim's head in the water and pulling it out for approximately 50 minutes.

Some of the assault tools seized at the scene were beyond the pale. It was an object made like a blackjack by placing a piece of clothing inside a t-shirt sleeve and tying the ends together, which was then soaked in water and used to assault the child.

To prove that this object was an assault weapon, the investigators made a tool in the same way, soaked it in water, and tested its power using an old pumpkin, and found that it took only three blows to break the pumpkin, and six blows to break it completely. The detectives also used their own experiments to prove that the tool was used in the assault because the victim's entire body was covered in bruises that had no consistent shape, making it impossible to identify the assault tool, and because the bundle of clothes found in the perpetrator's house was wet and they believed that it was most likely used in the assault, so they conducted an experiment to determine exactly how powerful the tool was.

The aunt and uncle also engaged in other bizarre behaviors, such as forcing them to chew their dog's feces, making them stand in front of a bee naked, making them do their laundry naked, and making them do gymnastics naked or making them go outside. On January 20, 2021 and January 24, 2021, she also made two of her own children witness the abuse of her niece. Ultimately, on February 8, 2021, the child died.

At the time of the initial report, the aunt and uncle falsely claimed that their nephew had drowned in the bathtub. However, during transport to the hospital, the responding paramedics found numerous bruises on the victim's body while performing CPR, suspected child abuse, and notified the police.

During the investigation, the couple initially denied responsibility for the extensive bruises on the child's body, claiming that they were self-inflicted or that their child had hit them. However, they later admitted to abusing the child to death, including beating him and forcing his head into and out of a bathtub filled with water. Further investigation by the police revealed that the aunt in charge of the child was a shaman, the uncle was a national musician, and claimed that the child was possessed by a ghost and that he did what he did to exorcise the ghost, and the biological mother, who knew about the abuse but virtually ignored it, was also involved in the investigation.

Surprisingly, the abusive aunt turned out to be the daughter of the perpetrator of the wife murder case in Gunsan on March 23, 2019, and this woman was the one who demanded severe punishment for her father through a Cheong Wa Dae petition on August 1, 2019. This revealed that she was the one who tortured and murdered her nephew in Yongin.

At the time, she was interviewed by MBC's True Story Investigation Unit, and she said that she too had suffered a lot of domestic violence from her father since childhood. She had effectively become the perpetrator of her own abuse, and that would not excuse her from repeating the pain she had suffered.

Here's what she revealed at the time

Her father used her and her sister as targets for his anger after their mother ran away; he also beat and sexually tortured her stepmother, with whom she went to live in elementary school, who took it out on her and her sister.

When her second stepmother left the house, she was dragged on the floor, kicked, and stomped on for not grabbing her.

She was threatened with a weapon outside the door and beaten badly while her hands and feet were tied.

During her school years, she ran away from home due to her father's assaults.

Given these circumstances, it is assumed that the perpetrating woman suffered violence from her father and that the trauma led to her abuse. However, it appears that the violence from that trauma was never directed at her own children, but only at her poor niece, which is just an excuse. What's more, the woman even enlisted her own daughter in the crime, which sparked a public outcry for the father to be held accountable and apologize.

The police investigated whether the child's biological mother had also been abusive, and eventually the victim's mother and the perpetrator's sister were also brought to the police for tacitly allowing the abuse. The mother had received photos of her daughter's swollen and blackened eyes and had taken no action. There were also KakaoTalk chats with her sister in which they slandered and cursed the child together. The reason she left her daughter with the perpetrator was for interior construction at her home, but she did not bring her daughter back after the construction was finished and left her for about four months.

In the last video of abuse, filmed an hour before the child's death, the child is unable to walk properly, falls down, and looks at her aunt. The suspect then dragged the child away, tortured her, and killed her. A forensic examination revealed that the child's condition on the day of her death was already in a state of rapid shock due to massive systemic subcutaneous bleeding from the assault, which would have been difficult to treat even if she had been taken to a hospital. Even during the autopsy, the child's scalp gushed blood when incised.