"It's My Fault. I Killed My Son"
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Her name is Song Jong-Soon. She marries an American soldier during his stay in Korea when she was barely over twenty, not so much from love, but more as a way of escaping poverty. After his military service she goes to the United States with him dreaming of a happier and better life. Upon arriving she finds her dream relentlessly shattered in the new land. With her uneducated and unpolished English she cannot adjust herself so well and successfully to the new and strange people and customs around. She is soon avoided by her husband's families, and finally by her husband himself. He often hits her. She gets finally divorced from him within years, and one daughter between them is taken away from her to the care of her husband by the court order, because she is suspected of a mental illness and regarded unfit for rearing a child.
She remarries another man, but very unfortunately this marriage also turns out to be a failure, and she is left alone with a son from her second husband. She has been working as a cashier for a small hotel in a town in North Carolina with absolute trust in her honesty from her employer, when the tragedy takes place. One night she comes to her apartment after work at around two o'clock in the morning to find her two-year old son dead on the floor of the living room under the weight of the television set on his head. The police arrive and they examine and question her about the cause of the boy's death. She explains that the boy might have pulled out one of the drawers of the chest on which the TV set is placed, stood in it, reached for the TV set, pulled it out with his two arms, fell with it on his back on the floor, and been killed. But the police suspect of murder.
She is tried, convicted, and sentenced to twenty years of imprisonment for the second degree murder at a court in North Caroline in 1987. She is in prison now serving her term.
Now five years after she began her prison term, more Koreans living in the United States came to know more about the case and began to raise some questions about the possibility of a mistrial seriously, and doubt if an innocent person had unjustly been punished for the crime she did not commit, and belatedly began to show sympathy and pity for the young woman who might have had no time to weep for her own son's tragic death. A Korean lawyer practicing in the United States, who is deeply sympathetic for her sorry lot and convinced of her innocence, is said to have been collecting new evidence and preparing for a new trial.
I came to know about this case, for the first time, through the special TV documentary program broadcast at midnight on the 13th of September, 1992, by SBS, and felt the need to point out some cultural differences or aspects that must be taken into account and consideration for this case in particular.
She confessed her crime in the first place. Taken to the police station for inquiry, I heard her saying over and saying over and over again that she killed her son. With her two arms around her head, burying her face on the table, sobbing, she said repeatedly, in her rather unnatural English, "It's my fault. It's my fault. I killed my son. I killed my son." A policewoman, standing by her, kept asking, "What? What? What did you say? What did you say?" The policewoman and the policemen around her must be greatly surprised at such an easy confession of the crime.
But I just wonder whether the very policeman or any of those policemen who heard the confession would have ever thought that that is quite the usual and common way of expressing a mother's extreme sorrow over an unexpected death of her son in Korea. When a friend of mine was drowned in the river at my hometown when I was a boy, I remember his mother agonizingly lamenting over his dead body with the exactly same expression: "It's my fault. It's my fault. I killed my son. I killed my son." She meant to say that she should have been more careful of his son's safety, should have protected him from danger, or should not allowed him to go swimming in the river, and so on. In short, it is a meaningless expression before the impotence of grief.
That the very way she murdered her son in a fit of irritation, as the police maintain, is bizarre and absurd. She is said to have pulled out one of the drawers of a small chest, the second one from the bottom among four, put her two-year old son in it, pushed it hard with the boy standing in it, causing suffocation, and simulated accident by putting the TV set on his head. If she really killed her son on impulse, I would like to point out that this is simply not a typical way of angry mothers' venting their impulse or punishing their irritating children. They whack them on the cheeks or face with a hand, or strike them with anything close at hand, or with anything we can lay our hands on. The method she is said to have used for the murder of her own son is too much calculating, deliberate, time-consuming, and more than anything else, not easy. If she were that much sober, she would not have said what she had said that would surely incriminate her of the crime. Did she then commit murder in a western style already, but speak in a Korean way of thinking yet?
It is reported that she was abusive in her language, violent in temper and very defiant in behaviour during the trial before the court. She is said to have kicked a TV cameraman. If she committed the murder and wanted to go unpunished, she should have known a better way of saying things, how to behave herself in the courtroom towards the jury, the judge and the attorney. She would and should have listened to the advice of her lawyer. To my eye she was just a typical Korean woman who was just sad, desperate and angry for being unjustly treated.
I think we have to admit that, with its fairness and integrity, with its efficiency and ability, the judicial system and process of the United States is much better and far advanced than ours in bringing the criminals to justice. And I firmly believe that the court of North Carolina did everything possible to do justice to the accused woman.
But we err. We all can. Her too easy verbal admission or confession of the crime, the defiant manner and the violent temper, and her abusive tongue and dubious former career in Korea, -- all these can be circumstantial evidence strong enough to corroborate the accusation of murder against her, but can also be equally strong testimony to her innocence. We sometimes err from conviction.
(September 30, 1992)
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