SYDNEY (AP) — A judge sentenced a Sydney taekwondo instructor Tuesday to life in prison without the possibility of parole for killing a 7-year-old student and the boy’s parents.
Kwang Kyung Yoo, 51, sat with his head bowed as Judge Ian Harrison said he would never be eligible for parole.
Harrison said Yoo was motivated by jealousy of the family’s financial success.
“I am satisfied that the level of culpability in the commission of these offenses is so extreme that the community’s interest in retribution, punishment, community protection and deterrence can only be met through the imposition of a life sentence,” Harrison told the New South Wales Supreme Court.
Harrison said Yoo had no reason to kill the boy or his parents in February last year.
State law prevents child victims of crime from being identified, so the child’s parents also cannot be named.
Yoo and his victims were all born in South Korea.
Yoo had pleaded guilty to all three murders in a previous court appearance. He had no prior criminal record.
Yoo strangled the boy and his 41-year-old mother at his Lion’s Taekwondo and Martial Arts Academy in Sydney’s west. At the time he owed tens of thousands of dollars and was behind on rent at the academy.
He took the mother’s Apple watch and drove her luxury car to the family home where he killed the boy’s 39-year-old father.
Yoo was injured in the struggle at home and drove himself to hospital where he told medical staff he had been attacked in a supermarket parking lot. The Police arrested him at the hospital.
After his arrest, Yoo could not explain how he intended to take the family’s money and later detailed his remorse.
The former teacher, whose students called him Master Lion, did not look at the family of the victims and other supporters as they sobbed in the public balcony of the Court after the sentence was given.
“These murders were horrible and violent, cruel and senseless cynical acts, carried out without a trace of human compassion,” said the judge.
While the crimes were planned – with Yoo surveilling the family home beforehand – he made no attempt to hide his crimes from the CCTV cameras at his academy or try to hide the bodies.
At a sentencing hearing in November, the judge heard Yoo lied about meeting Australia’s richest woman, Gina Rinehart, who was a qualifier for the 2000 Sydney Olympics, owned a luxury Lamborghini and lived in Sydney’s wealthy eastern suburbs.
To impress his own wife, he would send emails to himself, pretending to be important people. He sometimes used the title professor.
Harrison noted that Yoo had told a psychologist that his lies got bigger and bigger as his wife and the students asked more questions.
The judge noted that Yoo had been burdened since childhood with unrealistic expectations from his parents and South Korean culture about the level of success he needed to achieve.
Yoo was handed a box of tissues as the judge described his deep remorse for the hurt and pain he had caused.
In a letter to the judge, Yoo said he was “held captive by sin” and that he wanted to give himself to Jesus Christ.
“I wish I could turn back time so this didn’t happen,” Yoo wrote. “I pray every day for the people I hurt.”
Yoo’s lawyers had argued that he should be given a minimum nonparole period rather than a life sentence without the possibility of release. The maximum sentence for someone convicted of murder in New South Wales is life imprisonment, with a standard non-parole period of 20 years for the murder of an adult and 25 years for the murder of a child.