A 44-year-old Mr. Im in Andong, North Gyeongsang province was arrested Friday for sexually assaulting a local elementary school girl while she was on her way home from school. The assault took place on Oct. 31, and police were able to track down the offender by matching descriptions provided by the victim’s friends to a list of previous offenders. What was shocking about this incident, however, was that when police sent samples of the perpetrator’s bodily fluids to the National Institute of Scientific Investigation for testing, the DNA matched those from an unsolved rape case from November of the previous year in which a high school girl was forced into a truck as she was walking home from school, brought to a nearby field and raped. The victim in that case had also been sexually assaulted as a third grade elementary school student eight years earlier in 1995… by Mr. Im.
Im had previously served two prison terms for rape — a three year stint in 1995 (presumably for the case above) and a five-year stint in 1998.
An official from the police investigation explained that Im seemed socially well-adjusted and was physiologically sound, but being single, it appeared he committed his crimes by pervertedly making kids his targets because of his regularly surfacing sexual desires. Personally, I think it would have sufficed police to simply call the guy a beast, which Yonhap, much to its credit, did.
Having spent my first three years in Korea in the Andong area, I really pained me to read something like this happening down there. Just terrible. This is one of the reasons Korea was looking into enacting its own version of Megan’s Law back in February.
4 Comments
Ah, there are some very sick puppies out there. It’s a crying shame. I’d like some liberal to tell me how and why this guy can be ‘rehabilitated’. I think he should be put away for ever and castration is not a bad idea.
Does that make me a redneck? Or just someone who wants to stand up for the vulnerable? Heck, that makes me sound like a liberal!
I’ve had a judge (Korean) tell me that men that engage in sex with minors are only fined the first time. The second time they are given prison time. It seemed at the time he told me this that this sort of thing (sex or rape of/with minors) is not taken very seriously in Korean society. I really hope that I am mistaken on this . . .
i wonder what kind of jail time a US servicememer would get if he did this?
Hamel,
based on your comment, if that is what you think passes as a ‘liberal’, the only thing you ’sound like’ is an idiot.