The 50-year-old woman, surnamed Seok, is accused of swapping her 3-year-old daughter with her niece of the same age many years ago in Gumi City, Gyeongbuk Province, southeastern South Korea.
The incident occurred in February 2021 in Gumi City, causing shock in Korea after the body of a 3-year-old girl was found at the house of Ms. Seok’s daughter (daughter surnamed Kim).
On February 10, 2021, Mrs. Seok (the girl’s grandmother) informed the police that she had discovered the decomposed body of her 3-year-old nephew in the abandoned apartment for a long time. The girl was initially determined to have been locked, starved and left to die in the apartment six months earlier.
Soon after, the girl’s mother, a woman surnamed Kim (at that time 22 years old), was hunted down. Kim is divorced from her husband and is raising the child. In August 2020, she remarried, so she left the child to die.
Ms. Seok arrives at the Daegu District Court on August 17, 2021. Photo: Yonhap
However, later, through DNA tests, the police discovered that Kim was not the mother of the ill-fated baby, but the sister. The person who is said to be the child’s grandmother (ie Mrs. Seok) is actually the biological mother. The DNA test also showed that neither Ms. Seok’s ex-husband nor her current husband was the baby’s biological father, proving that she had a child from an extramarital relationship. To this day, it is not clear who the biological father of the child is.
Kim and her mother were pregnant and gave birth together for a period of time (March to April 2018). Mrs. Seok swapped the two babies after they were born without Kim’s knowledge. She raised the child and thought it was her own, then abandoned her to die.
The purpose of the silent swap of Mrs. Seok is said to be for her daughter to raise her child. The whereabouts of the other child (Kim’s biological son) is still being searched.
According to the news agency YonhapMs. Seok vehemently denied the allegation, insisting she had not given birth to any more children, saying that the DNA results were incorrect.
Kim was sentenced to 20 years in prison for leaving her sister (whom she thought was her daughter) to death. Photo: Yonhap
As for Kim, she was sentenced to 20 years in prison for leaving her sister (who she thought was a girl) to death and was required to attend 160 hours of abuse-related psychotherapy. children.
Meanwhile, the real biological mother of the girl, Mrs. Seok, was charged with abandoning her daughter’s body and kidnapping her granddaughter. Ms. Seok is accused of abandoning both her 3-year-old child, who died and her grandson born in 2018. During the trial on August 17, 2021, the court sentenced Seok to 8 years in prison.
However, at the appeal hearing on February 2, the Daegu District Court sentenced Ms. Seok to 2 years in prison, 3 years of probation for disposing of her 3-year-old daughter’s body. However, on the allegation of kidnapping a niece of the same age, the court said that the evidence was not enough. The court held that the DNA test results could not be evidence that Ms. Seok swapped her daughter and daughter.