Korean Teenager Kills Oppressive Mother (Reflection)

This is a truly tragic story. A young boy harassed and bullied by his mother to get the top grades, in order to enroll in the premier law school in South Korea.

The mother abused her son so ruthlessly, that the son finally killed his mother, since he feared for his life.

Can you imagine such abuse? Such torture? How would you have responded?

Teenager Sentenced for Killing Grades-Obsessed Mother

A Seoul court on Tuesday sentenced an 18-year old boy to three years and six months in prison for killing his mother, a crime he said he was driven to by the physical and mental abuse he sustained because of her obsession with his school grades.

The case came to light late last year after the boy's father, who lived apart from his family, visited home after a year and found a bedroom door tightly sealed and his son acting suspiciously.

According to media accounts, the boy, appearing in court in school uniform, testified that his mother had beaten him with a golf club, verbally abused him and denied him meals for a period of days because she was angry with his test scores. He said he killed her out of fear that her violence could eventually kill him.

Police said the boy stabbed his mother to death in March last year, put her body in her room and left it there until it was discovered after eight months. He sealed the room to hide the smell of the body, went about his daily life and occasionally invited friends to his house. 

Here's the initial report from the Korea Times, a year earlier:

A Seoul woman who constantly hounded her high school student son to come first nationwide in college entrance exams has allegedly been killed by the son, police said Thursday, illustrating the severe social fallout of the nation's obsession with educational achievement.

Police said they have sought a warrant to arrest the 18-year-old son, who is suspected of killing his mother and concealing her body within their house.

The student, whose name was withheld, allegedly killed his mother by stabbing her in the neck at their home in March, and has kept her body in her room for the past eight months, officials at Seoul's Gwangjin Police Station said.

The boy's father, who lived apart from his wife, reported his son's suspicious behavior to police after a recent visit. Police officers went to the home where they found the woman's body and took the teenager into custody for questioning.

The high school senior confessed to investigators that he had killed his 51-year-old mother in fear of harsh punishment as she had pressured and beaten him to come first among all students nationwide in the college entrance exam.

The student, who ranked about 4,000th nationwide in March's mock college entrance exams, changed his rank to read 62nd out of about 700,000 fellow third-graders. His mother was not satisfied with even his doctored national ranking and beat her son with a baseball bat, urging him to rise to the top.

According to officials, the suspect said he was afraid that his mother would find out about his fabricated report card in a visit to the school she was planning.

Despite him achieving relatively good grades, his mother was never satisfied and pressed him to earn better scores so he could enter the top law school in the nation, sometimes not feeding him or allowing him to sleep.

Experts say the tragic incident partially resulted from social pressure in a society that places high emphasis on big-name schools to achieve success. (Yonhap)