Ee Bok-su, mother to murder victim Jo Jong-pil
22nd September 2015
Mother of the Itaewon Murder Incident [Victim] Speaks: “Evil people are living more happily than I am”
(Original post from Huffington Post Korea)
“I think I’ve been living waiting for this day to come,” said Ee Bok-su, mother of the victim, when she heard the news that cited perpetrator Arthur John Patterson, 36, had finally been brought back domestically [ie, to Korea] to pay for his crimes. “At first I thought ‘I have to keep living’, but I wasn’t sure if I could live for [even] two or three more years. In the end it seems like I held on because the case wasn’t finished.”
When Mrs Ee heard the news about Peterson’s repatriation, she said in a statement to Yeonhap News on the 22nd of September that “the killer came and killed, so he should pay the penalty. I don’t want to see him get the death penalty – yet he should get life imprisonment so that he does not kill anyone else out in society”.
Jo Jong-pil
Mrs Ee said of her sacrificed* [희생된] son: “he never fought during his childhood, not even once, and never once did a curse word cross his mouth… he had a promising future but the murder has ruined all of that”, she said, bursting with rage.
After the murder of Mr Jo [his] family have continually gone though hardship. The anger felt by Mr Jo’s father after the incident has increased but has not consumed him. He is still reluctant to speak about the incident. While Mrs Ee was dealing with the news of her sons’s death she also underwent hip surgery, and she also suffers from knee pain. “My child has been killed. Who could properly deal with that?” she sighed. If Patterson returns “I will definitely be at the court right up until the final judgement,” she said.
Mr Jo was found dead, having been stabbed with a knife, in a hamburger restaurant in Itaewon on the 3rd of April 1997.
Analysis: The Itaewon Hamburger Restaurant Murder (이태원 햄버거 가게 살인 사건) was a crime in 1997 which shocked Korea. A 22-year-old, Jo Jong-pil, was stabbed repeatedly in the toilet of Itaewon Burger King in an unprovoked attack, allegedly by 17-year-old Arthur Jon Patterson. (Itaewon is a central district of Seoul known as a hub for foreigners.) Patterson, a US-Korean dual national, fled to the US the day afterwards. Only now has he been extradited. Random violent crime in Korea is extremely rare (although the country has a significant problem with domestic violence) so the brutality of Jong-pil’s death has given the incident a grim persistence in the country’s imagination.
Arthur John Patterson