A mother in New Zealand who killed her two children and hid their bodies in suitcases has been sentenced to life in prison.
Hakyung Lee, who was found guilty in September of the shocking murders of eight-year-old Yuna Jo and six-year-old Minu Jo, must spend at least 17 years behind bars before being eligible for parole.
Lee, 45, argued that she was insane at the time of the murders in 2018, which occurred shortly after her husband’s death. High Court Judge Geoffrey Venning said Lee’s mental health played a role in the case, but that his actions were calculated.
The children’s remains were not discovered until 2022 by a couple who won an auction for the contents of an abandoned storage unit in Auckland.
During a trial that lasted more than two weeks, Hakyung Lee’s defense lawyers told the court that his mental health deteriorated after Jo’s death and that he came to believe it was better if the rest of the family died together.
Lee attempted to commit suicide and kill her children by giving them a dose of the antidepressant nortriptyline mixed with juice, but she got the wrong dose and woke up to find her children were dead, her lawyers said.
Prosecutors argued that Lee’s was “a selfish act to free herself from the burden of being a single mother.”
After the murders, Lee changed his name and left New Zealand. She was arrested in South Korea, where she was born, in September 2022 and extradited to New Zealand that same year.
The court heard on Wednesday how the murders affected the families of Lee and her husband Ian Jo.
In an emotional statement read by prosecutors, Lee’s mother, Choon Ja Lee, said she regrets not taking her daughter to counseling, noting that Lee had “no will to live” after Jo died of cancer in November 2017.
“If she wanted to die, why didn’t she die alone? Why did she take the innocent children with her?” Choon Ja Lee wrote, according to New Zealand media reports.
Jo’s brother Jimmy said he “never imagined such a profound tragedy would happen to our family.”
Her own mother, Yuna and Minu’s other grandmother, still doesn’t know they are dead, she said.
“My late brother’s wish was for me to protect them,” Jimmy Jo said. “This is an ongoing sentence from which I will never be able to get parole.”
Lee was likely suffering from “atypical depression” and a prolonged grief reaction at the time of the murders, according to a psychiatric evaluation carried out before the sentencing, local broadcaster RNZ reported.
Judge Venning ordered that Lee be treated as a “special patient” during her incarceration, given her mental state.
“You couldn’t cope when [your husband] “She became seriously ill and perhaps could not bear to have the children by her side as a constant reminder of her former happy life, which had been cruelly taken from her,” the judge said.
