Show Notes
She was sixteen months old.
She had a name before the adoption — Jeong-in — and that is the name a whole country ended up saying out loud. Not in court documents. On sheets of A4 paper, held up in front of phone cameras, by hundreds of thousands of people who had never met her. Jeong-in, I'm sorry.
Three times, before she died, an adult noticed something wrong and picked up the phone. A daycare teacher. An acquaintance. A paediatrician who examined her and said, in effect, get this child out of that house today. Three reports. Three case files. All three closed.
Twenty days after the last one, she was carried into an emergency room in cardiac arrest. The forensic examiner who later gave evidence at the trial had performed around three thousand eight hundred autopsies over nineteen years. He told the court this was the worst child-abuse case he had ever examined — that you would not have needed an autopsy to know.
This is not a story about a monster nobody saw coming. Everybody saw. That is the story.
Jeong-in Child Abuse Death (정인이 사건) · 2020-10-13 · Mok-dong, Yangcheon-gu, Seoul, South Korea
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