The former teacher of child homicide victims struggled to hold back tears today, and so did jurors, as she fondly recalled how the siblings were model students.
The bodies of Yuna Jo, who was 8 when she died, and her 6-year-old brother Minu Jo were discovered inside suitcases in South Auckland in 2022 – four years after they were last seen alive.
“She had a smile that lit up the world,” longtime Papatoetoe South School teacher Mary Robertson said of the older sibling as she gave evidence in the High Court at Auckland today at the ongoing double-murder trial of Hakyung “Jasmine” Lee, the children’s mother.
“She was beautifully behaved, really respectful and had a very tight group of friends.”
Minu, meanwhile, “was just a beautiful, joyful little bubbling boy” when he started at the school two years later.
He had a slight speech impediment from a cleft lip, which his mother was concerned might lead to bullying, but he adapted well, the teacher recalled.
“Their teachers adored both of them,” Robertson said.
But then came a somewhat odd meeting with their mother in November 2017 in which Robertson was told it would be the children’s last day at school.
Their father had died earlier in the week and had a small funeral, but the children still didn’t know about the death, Robertson was told.
The defendant told the teacher she planned to take the children to Australia’s Gold Coast to visit some theme parks then on to Korea, where they had extended family.
“She wanted them to have some fun and some good memories before she let them know [about their father’s death],” Robertson recalled.
“She was going to tell them just before they came home.”
Robertson recalled asking if she had bought the tickets yet, hoping the mother might reconsider.
“I just warned her that children needed friends, family, their usual routine to be able to cope with it,” she said.
“I said, ‘Just think twice.’ Our school is really good at supporting our whānau with difficult times.”
The teacher described Lee as a little tearful as she described the family situation and the indefinite plans, which she said might not involve returning to New Zealand.
“She just seemed a little bit lost,” she said.
Lee has acknowledged through her standby counsel that she killed her children seven months later, in June 2018. But she’s not guilty by reason of insanity, jurors were told yesterday during the defence opening statement.
Lawyer Lorraine Smith said Lee divvied up a prescription sleep drug among herself and her children and was surprised when she woke up, finding that the fatal overdose had worked on her children.
Prosecutors have agreed the homicide involved the use of the prescription drug but have suggested Lee might have instead suffocated her children after they were in a medication-induced stupor.
Regardless of the method of death, Lee does not appear to meet the legal definition of insanity, Crown Solicitor Natalie Walker told jurors yesterday.
After the deaths, Lee changed her identity, concealed the children’s bodies in suitcases at a storage facility and moved to South Korea, all of which suggests she knew what she had done was morally wrong, the Crown said.
The teacher told jurors that she checked after the next school year began to see if the children, who were in years one and three, had been re-enrolled.
When she saw they weren’t, she assumed they had moved to South Korea, as had been suggested by the mother.
But in actuality, prosecutors said yesterday, the family had returned to their Papatoetoe rental home. Lee had decided to keep them at home anyway.
Before husband Ian Jo’s cancer battle, he and Lee had seemed to be impressively attentive parents, Robertson said.
“They were just such caring parents who were so involved and interested in her education,” she recalled of when their eldest child started at the school.
“They really wanted her to do well and they wanted to know how they could help.”
They didn’t need to do much, she added, because Yuna was such a good student.
“They were actually two of my favourite parents to work with,” Robertson said.
November appears to have been an especially difficult month for Lee as she watched her husband’s potentially excruciating death by way of oesophageal cancer.
Jurors were also told about an incident days before his death in which Ian Jo had taken his wife’s car keys while she was in the bathroom and driven off from the hospice facility alone.
It was feared he had driven to Duder Regional Park in Auckland to commit suicide.
In a panic, it appears, Lee texted her husband that if he died, she and the children would die too. The statement raised an alarm among nurses and mental health workers, but by the next day the alarm had subsided.
Lee took back the statement in a discussion with nurse Natalie Woodward, the long-time mental health specialist told jurors.
It had been an “irrational response” prompted by tiredness, desperation and fear, the nurse recalled Lee saying.
It was intended to get Ian Jo to come back and it appeared to have worked, Lee told her.
Lee emphasised to the nurse that her children were not her property and their lives were not her’s to take, Woodward recalled.
“I cannot take their lives,” she allegedly said. “I would never do that.”
Jurors also heard today from the children’s uncle and aunt, who recalled checking in on the family in April 2018 after learning the children hadn’t been re-enrolled in school.
Sei Wook “Jimmy” Cho said his sister-in-law had always seemed to fluctuate between very happy and sad, even before his brother’s death.
During the visit, Cho said his wife, Bo Ram Lim, went into a bedroom to speak with Lee while he sat with the children in the lounge.
Yuna and Minu played video games, the curtains drawn. Cho took a haunting photo of the siblings – the last time he would see them alive.
Cho said he returned to the house months later after his attempts to contact Lee further weren’t answered. He had received a call from Lee’s mother saying she also couldn’t reach the defendant.
He looked inside the house and realised the family wasn’t Korean. That’s how he realised, he said, that his sister-in-law had moved.
Inside the bedroom during the April visit, Lim said Lee indicated to her that she wasn’t coping well. Lim recalled asking why the children weren’t in school.
“She said that she didn’t have energy to look after children and take care of things they had to bring to school,” Lim said through a translator, explaining that she asked Lee if she could do anything to help.
“She said that she just wanted to be alone.”
On June 1, just weeks before the children’s deaths, Lim checked in again via the KakaoTalk messaging app.
“Sister in law – do you want to have lunch together on a weekday since next week is your birthday? How about Tuesday?” Lim wrote in Korean.
Lee responded: “Sorry – thank you for checking up on me but I want to be alone at the moment ... sorry ... Be well and will contact you later.”
Lim messaged again on June 8, 19 days before the children’s deaths, wishing Lee a happy birthday.
The defendant didn’t appear to respond.
The trial is set to continue before Justice Geoffrey Venning and the jury tomorrow, at which time Lee’s mother is expected to give evidence.
Craig Kapitan is an Auckland-based journalist covering courts and justice. He joined the Herald in 2021 and has reported on courts since 2002 in three newsrooms in the US and New Zealand.
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