“Sentence Too Light”… ‘Jeong-in Case’ Stepfather Released After 5-Year Serving… Netizens Outraged

On October 12, 2020, Jeong-In was sent to daycare in serious condition. According to the daycare teachers, she couldn’t walk, stand, drink or eat all day. Her stomach seemed swollen, but she didn’t fuss or cry at all. Her diaper was also dry for hours without any urine passing. The teachers called her adoptive mother, and she came to check Jeong-In’s condition for a few minutes, but then left saying there was nothing to worry about.

However, Jeong-In had no energy and seemed very weak. After being dehydrated, she took a few sips of milk that the teacher tried to give her, but she immediately panted after drinking the liquid, and her body began to shiver. When her adoptive father picked her up in the afternoon, the teacher expressed her concern about Jeong-In’s health, and how she didn’t walk all day; at that moment, her adoptive father forced Jeong-In to take a few steps towards him, trying to prove that she was fine. The teachers asked the adoptive father to take Jeong-In to the hospital immediately, but he decided not to.

The next day on October 13, 2020, Jeong-In’s adoptive mother recorded with her phone to force Jeong-In to walk between 8:46 a.m. and 9:01 a.m. In the video, Jeong-In seemed to be in severe pain, constantly crying, but her adoptive mother was yelling and screaming at Jeong-In, demanding that she walk. At around 9:40 a.m., the neighbors downstairs heard some extremely loud noises from above, as if dumbbells were falling on the ground about 4-5 times. The neighbor went upstairs to check if everything was fine, but only Jang answered the door while her biological daughter peeked out. Jang apologized for the noise and said everything was alright. Then Jang called the daycare, stating that Jeong-In would be absent from daycare on that day. Around 10:19 a.m., she took her biological daughter to the daycare, and then to a lingerie store on the way home. In the surveillance footage, Jeong-In was not with her adoptive mother, and so she was alone at home again. Once returning home, Jang finally called a taxi to bring Jeong-In to the hospital. The taxi driver saw that Jeong-In was turning blue and unconscious, so he asked Jang to call the ambulance instead, but she refused. After several rounds of cardiac arrest and resuscitation in the ER, Jeong-In died on October 13, 2020, at the age of 16 months. While Jeong-In was fighting for her life in the ER, her adoptive mother was perusing online shopping malls and looking for a fishcake to buy outside of the emergency room.

Autopsy
During the trial, the autopsy was performed, and the doctor testified that Jeong-In’s case was the worst child abuse case he had ever seen in his 20 years of experience. Out of the 3,800 bodies he’d examined, from a pediatric perspective, Jeong-In had the worst injuries and her entire body was severely damaged. He had never seen a ruptured pancreas in a pediatric case, and he concluded that Jeong-In was probably stomped on multiple times on her stomach by adults. Only extremely strong force applied to her abdomen would cause such rupture of her internal organs. Additionally, based on some recovered tissue found in Jeong-In’s organs, the doctors also believed that there was another severe beating that happened 3–5 days prior to her death. Jeong-In spent the last few days of her life in extreme pain, with even breathing being painful, which explained why she did not cry in the daycare where she was last seen alive.