Aunt abandoned intellectually disabled 6-year-old, hid fact for 18 years, state audit finds

A woman abandoned her brother’s 6-year-old child, who has an intellectual disability, outside a church near a crowded market in Seongnam, Gyeonggi, in 2008 and kept it hidden for 18 years, police found.

The case surfaced through a Board of Audit and Inspection (BAI) survey of children with disabilities who had gone five years without any medical records. The survey found that the aunt was not caring for the child, who has never been found.

Whether he is still alive is unknown.

The BAI launched the survey in June and is now compiling the results. Local governments conducted the checks as part of the audit, and more cases like this one could come to light. An earlier BAI audit, in 2023, led to the discovery of two babies’ bodies hidden in a freezer in Suwon, Gyeonggi.

The child, Jo Yong-jun, was 6 when abandoned around 1 p.m. on May 14, 2008, in front of the Seongnam-dong Catholic Church in Jungwon District. It was a market day for the nearby Moran Folk 5-Day Market, and the streets were crowded. Jo, who has a grade 2 intellectual disability, a level classified as severe, could barely say their own name at the time, police said.

Jo’s father, who lived in Gwangju, Gyeonggi, found it hard to provide care after a divorce and left Jo with his older sister, the aunt. Jo was then passed to a grandfather and an uncle, both in Seongnam, before returning to the aunt.

Police opened an investigation only in July, 18 years after the abandonment. The BAI survey had shown that the aunt was not caring for Jo. Warned that she would face a criminal complaint unless she reported Jo missing, she reluctantly went to the police.

“I entrusted Yong-jun’s upbringing to an acquaintance, and [the child] went to the same kindergarten as the acquaintance’s children, so they will remember,” the aunt told police when questioned as a witness.

Missing persons investigators at Bundang Police Station in Seongnam, Gyeonggi, spent more than 90 days retracing Jo’s whereabouts before establishing that the report was false. The acquaintance had died. The acquaintance’s children said Jo had visited their home but never lived with them, and people who knew the acquaintance in Yeoju, Gyeonggi, where the acquaintance had worked, did not remember Jo. Neither did the landlord.

As investigators closed in, the aunt texted police in August that she would come in four days later and give an honest statement, then fled. She switched off her phone and moved between motels before hiding at the studio apartment where her son lives. Police caught her there after tracking her hospital records and other data.

She admitted to abandoning Jo only after police applied for a warrant to arrest her.

Police concluded that the abandonment violated the Child Welfare Act, but the seven-year statute of limitations had run out.

A child abuse law that took effect in September 2014 suspends the statute of limitations on child abuse crimes until the victim reaches adulthood. By then, however, six years and four months of the period had already passed. The clock started again in 2021, when Jo turned 19, and ran out in May 2022.

Instead, police detained the aunt and referred her to the Public Prosecution Service’s Seongnam branch on Oct. 8 on suspicion of obstructing the performance of official duties by fraudulent means. She deliberately misled investigators and threw the search for Jo into confusion for more than 90 days from July 1, police said. If convicted, she faces up to five years in prison or a fine of up to 10 million won ($7,500).

Police are still searching for Jo, who would now be 24. Since Jo struggled to say even their own name, investigators are considering the possibility that Jo was given a different name or resident registration number.

Officers visited the Seongnam-dong Catholic Church and Anna’s House, a nearby shelter for homeless people and youth living away from home, but no one remembered Jo. Police have also obtained about 30,000 records of newly issued resident registration cards from the Ministry of the Interior and Safety. They sent the records to the Ministry of Health and Welfare and the National Center for the Rights of the Child to pick out people with intellectual disabilities. Investigators plan to interview anyone flagged as a possible match in person.

The last objective record that Jo was alive dates to January 2006, when Jo, then 4, was diagnosed with the disability at Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital.

BAI audits have exposed child abuse and crimes involving missing children before, most notably in the 2023 Suwon case.

During a 2023 audit of the Ministry of Health and Welfare, the BAI found 2,236 children whose births were recorded at hospitals but never registered with the government. It identified them by matching the temporary numbers hospitals assign to newborns for vaccinations and other care against birth registration records.

The BAI picked out 23 of the children it judged to be at high risk of abuse or neglect and asked local governments to confirm where they were and whether they were safe. A field check by the Suwon city government and a police investigation then found the bodies of two babies killed by their mother. The bodies had been kept in the freezer of a refrigerator at an apartment in the city’s Jangan District, and the mother was sentenced to eight years in prison.

Other deaths and abandonment soon came to light. In all, 249 of the children were confirmed dead. Crimes were confirmed in seven of those deaths, and eight people, including guardians, were referred to prosecutors. Among those cases, a 2-month-old was killed and abandoned by a stream in Daejeon in 2019, and a 5-day-old was killed and dumped in a stream in Geoje, South Gyeongsang, in 2022. A 1-day-old with a disability was left to die and secretly buried on a hillside in 2015.

Since 2023, the Ministry of Health and Welfare has run five rounds of such checks covering 11,960 children and has asked police to investigate 3,693 cases. It has confirmed that 711 of the children died.

“This is a targeted audit to find blind spots across welfare for people with disabilities and to examine where the system needs to improve,” a BAI official said. "We are linking and analyzing the information we have confirmed to check whether children with disabilities are receiving proper protection and care and whether they have been left in abusive situations such as abandonment.”

BY HEO JEONG-WON, CHOI HYE-RI [[email protected]]