The news of that day has passed, but its meaning remains with us today. "Today's That Day" reads the present through records of the past.
On May 14, 2007, a teenage girl was found dead near a building of Suwon High School in Paldal District, Suwon, Gyeonggi Province. The discovery of an unidentified girl's body on the grounds of a boys' school immediately drew media attention.
Police attempted to check the girl's fingerprints against juvenile records but found no match. With no clues to identify her, investigators concluded she was a homeless person and began canvassing the homeless population around Suwon Station.
During the investigation, police heard a rumor. It claimed that the leader of a homeless group at Suwon Station had ordered his subordinates to beat a girl who had stolen money, that she had died from the beating, and that her body had been dumped at the school. Police accepted the rumor as fact and arrested two intellectually disabled men who had been living on the streets at Suwon Station — Jung, then 29, and Kang, then 29 — as the culprits.
Eight months after the incident, prosecutors additionally indicted five runaway teenagers who were being held at a juvenile classification center at the time, charging them with bodily injury resulting in death. The teenagers admitted to the charges during the prosecution's investigation. But once the trial began, they all retracted their confessions in unison. They said police and prosecutors had forced false confessions through threats and inducements.
Decisive evidence supporting their claim was submitted. It was a video recording of the prosecutor's interrogation. The footage showed the prosecutor directly telling the teenagers the details of the case and drilling them into their memories.
One of the teenagers said he had met another runaway in Seongnam, not Suwon, on the day of the incident and asked that his alibi be verified. But the prosecutor dismissed the request and instead accused him of lying.
After court battles led by state-appointed defense attorney Park Joon-young, the appellate court (presiding judge Cho Hee-dae) acquitted all five teenagers in January 2009. In July 2010, the Supreme Court (Justice Kim Neung-hwan presiding) finalized the acquittal. Immediately after the ruling, prosecutors issued a statement suggesting the judges had erred, drawing heavy criticism.
The two homeless men arrested earlier later also claimed their confessions had been false. Prosecutors indicted them on perjury charges, but in June 2012 the Supreme Court acquitted them of perjury. That same month, the Supreme Court overturned a lower court ruling that had rejected one of the homeless men's petition for retrial on the injury-death charge, sending the case back to the Seoul High Court. In a retrial in October 2013, they too were finally acquitted.
The girl's identity was revealed only about 50 days after her body was found. Police took the unusual step of releasing photos of the body's face and clothing, and SBS's "I Want to Know That" ran a campaign to identify her. Her parents, who had seen the broadcast, came forward.
The girl was not homeless. She was Kim, a 15-year-old middle school second-grader with an intellectual disability. She had run away from home before but had not been living on the streets. She had told her family she was going out to meet a friend, and met with foul play after leaving home.
In November 2011, new circumstances emerged through reporting by "I Want to Know That." It was confirmed that friends who had visited Kim's home a few days before the incident had stolen valuables and fled, and an online commenter testified that three runaway teenagers he had met in Cheonan had told him, "We were hitting the girl and unintentionally killed her, and we got scared and ran away."
Police deemed the tip credible and launched a reinvestigation, but the statute of limitations on the bodily injury resulting in death charge expired in 2014 while the case was still under investigation. The real perpetrators were never identified, and the case remains permanently unsolved.
