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At 3:44 p.m. on March 26, carrying her schoolbag in her hand, a little girl in third grade got into the elevator of her apartment building in Goyang, Gyeonggi Province. Shortly afterwards, a man wearing a baseball cap followed her in, ordered her to come with him and tried to pull her out of the elevator. When the girl resisted, the man pulled a yellow box cutter out of his pocket, kicked her six times and punched her in the face. When the elevator stopped on the third floor, the man grabbed the girl by the hair and dragged her out. She grabbed the rails of the elevator and resisted, but ended up being dragged out on the ground. One of her shoes fell off and the elevator doors closed.
There are probably many Koreans who were shocked and dismayed after watching this horrifying images captured on surveillance camera and broadcast on SBS on Sunday night. If a girl on her way home from school in broad daylight can get beaten and dragged from the elevator of her own apartment like an animal on its way to be butchered, then what place is truly safe for children? If a female college student living on the first floor had not rushed to the elevator after hearing the girlĄ¯s screams, then there is no guarantee that she would not have suffered the fate of two schoolgirls who were murdered by a neighbor in Anyang, Gyeonggi Province.
Two police officers dispatched to the scene shortly after the incident saw the horrifying images captured on the surveillance camera and simply returned to their precinct, filing a report the following day to the Ilsan Police Station as a simple case of assault. Police had decided it had been a simple assault by an intoxicated individual, even though they saw images of the man wielding a box cutter he had prepared for the crime. Before questioning the professional ability of the police officers, we must question their level of intelligence.
On March 27, around 100 leaflets displaying the face of the criminal were posted in and around the apartment complex, printed by the parents after they heard nothing from the police. It wasnĄ¯t until March 29 that a detective from Ilsan Police Station came to investigate the scene of the crime, which had been assigned to him on March 27. The detective is said to have taken a day off on March 28. It was only after the news report on Sunday night that the chief of Ilsan Police Station appointed an investigative team to the case and made a huge ruckus in the process.
At 11 a.m. on March 26, the National Police Agency had announced a comprehensive set of measures to deal with child abductions and missing children. The NPA had made the announcement after mounting criticism over its ineptitude after it took 82 days to catch the criminal who murdered Lee Hye-jin (11) and Wu Ye-seul (9). The murderer was discovered to have been a neighbor. The agency vowed it would create a 1,056-strong special unit handling missing child cases and would swiftly mobilize the maximum number of forces once a report is filed. Less than six hours after that, it was shown up to have been a huge bag of hot air.
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