Freak Death Echoes Half a World Away
S. Korean Press Hints That Woman's Fall From Cab in Va. Was No Accident
By David Cho
Washington Post
May 12, 2001

Chun Hui Pak got off the plane from South Korea at Dulles International Airport and grabbed a cab to her Alexandria hotel. As the taxi was speeding along the Capital Beltway at 70 mph, the car door opened and Pak fell out.

The stunned cabby pulled over and ran into oncoming traffic to drag Pak to the side of the road. But her skull was fractured, her body bloodied and limp. Pak was dead.

Suicide? Foul play? A growing circle of Koreans and Korean Americans think the latter, and South Korea's national press has run several stories alleging that the U.S. military orchestrated Pak's death.

But Virginia's medical examiner, who closed the nine-month investigation last month, ruled out both suicide and homicide and concluded that Pak, 36, died accidentally, even though police found nothing wrong with the car door.

"Nobody will ever know why she left that cab," said state Trooper Robert Thomas, an investigator.

During the nine months since Pak's death on Aug. 5, the mystery has fueled the conspiracy theories that have run rampant in the Korean press both here and in Seoul. The stories have a theme: Pak, a budget analyst for Camp Henry, the U.S. Army base in Taegu, South Korea, was murdered, and somehow, for some reason, the U.S. military was involved.

Experts on South Korea and its relations with the United States say the reaction of the Korean press to Pak's death is notable because of the quick accusations against the U.S. military. Those experts wonder whether the stories underscore a growing dissatisfaction with the 37,000 GIs stationed in South Korea.

"That current of mistrust, that the United States is a bit arrogant and that U.S. servicemen don't treat Koreans equally, is pretty widespread," said Charles Ziegler, chairman of the political science department at the University of Louisville who has studied U.S. military relations in South Korea.

The Pentagon referred questions on Pak's death to military officials in South Korea. Col. Russell A. Bucy, commander of Camp Henry, did not respond to inquiries from The Washington Post, but has said on South Korean television that the conspiracy theories are ridiculous.

Still, an hour-long news program in March that was broadcast nationwide on one of South Korea's major networks alleged that the U.S. military may have wanted Pak killed because she may have unearthed corruption at the base.

General circulation newspapers insinuated that the Virginia State Police helped the Army cover up the truth.

Katharine Moon, a political science professor at Wellesley College, believes such anti-Americanism, once considered a radical left-wing view, has become more of a mainstream sentiment.

In the months before Pak's death, Korean media reported that the U.S. military was dumping untreated formaldehyde into Seoul's Han river -- an act that U.S. officials apologized for -- and that its bombing exercises in the countryside were killing cattle and damaging farms.

The strangling death of a Korean barmaid by an American serviceman last year and the revelation in 1999 that U.S. soldiers shot unarmed Korean civilians during the Korean War had laid the groundwork for mistrust, Moon said.

"Apart from the merits of the Pak case, my bet is that people are looking at this in the context of these other events," Moon said.

But Hyung Kook Kim, director of the Center for Asian Studies at American University, disagreed, saying the majority of South Koreans support the U.S. military presence.

Kim said some stories, like those about Pak's death, were sensationalized to pressure the United States to revise the Status of Forces Agreement, which governs the legal status of U.S. troops in South Korea.

After months of protests on the streets of Seoul and a barrage of anti-U.S. military stories in the media, the agreement was modified at the end of last year to give South Korean authorities jurisdiction over U.S. soldiers who commit major crimes in South Korea.

"With all that was happening last year, there were more stories against the U.S. military appearing, but that doesn't mean those news stories changed the basic opinion of the mainstream," Kim said.

Ki D. Kwak, a reporter for the Washington edition of the Korea Times, a major daily newspaper that published several front-page stories about Pak's death, said there are real suspicions about the conduct of the United States in that case. "It's just my opinion, but the Virginia State Police closed the case too early," Kwak said. "We are not sure, but we have the presumption that there was some possibility of murder."

Pak was hired as a waitress for Camp Henry in 1989 and her rise through the civilian ranks was quick. In six months, she was promoted to word processing clerk. By 1999, she was a budget analyst for the camp's recreation department.

Bucy described Pak in his letters as an outstanding employee and a leader among her peers. Pak, Bucy wrote, "forever will be held in our highest esteem. We shall never get over her tragic passing."

Bucy sent Pak to the Washington area last August for a budget training session at the Department of Defense. She got into the taxi about 9 p.m. Then, according to Aslan Tanoli, the Washington Flyer driver who was the last person to see her alive, Pak yelled, "Wrong, wrong, I'm out!" Seconds later she was lying on the road.

Thomas, the Virginia state trooper, said police ruled out suicide. It hardly made sense, he said, that Pak would get off her plane and decide she wanted to die. "We get suicides all the time, but nobody just jumps out of a moving car," he said.

Her husband, Hak Ho Nam, 42, who has been left to raise their two young children, said she showed no signs of distress and was very happy with the way her career and family life were going.

In her suitcase, she had a small notebook showing what she planned to wear for her week-long visit to America. She also saved a bag of peanuts from the flight. "No one would do those things if they were about to commit suicide," Nam said in a telephone interview.

If it wasn't suicide, could the car door have opened accidentally?

Police said no. The latch was working fine. Wind resistance from the car's speed would have made it very difficult to open the door anyway, Thomas said.

Thomas said homicide also was out of the question.

No blood was found in the cab, no foreign DNA on her clothes or fingernails -- the normal signs of physical struggle. Blood tests showed no drugs, unusual chemicals or alcohol.

Tanoli, who still works for Washington Flyer, was the only other person in the cab at the time, Thomas said, but it would have been impossible for him to drive and push her out the rear door. And besides, Tanoli had no motive or relationship to Pak, police said. He passed a lie detector test, Thomas said.

Tanoli said Pak asked to use his cell phone a few minutes before she died. Police traced the number to the mother of Pak's supervisor, Sandres Mann. Mann happened to be in Mississippi on a separate trip at the time of Pak's death. His mother answered the phone and told Pak that Mann wasn't home. Mann, an installation manager for the base in Taegu, said he did not know why Pak tried to call him and has been bristling at the Korean press's insinuation that he had something to do with her death.

"The Korean newspapers were irresponsible in their reporting just for the sake of selling papers by sensationalizing an unfortunate event," he said.

"I had nothing to do with the death of Mrs. Pak. My visit to the States and her visit to the States were totally unrelated."

Nam, meanwhile, has struggled to explain his wife's death to their children. Since August, he has been leading anti-American demonstrations outside the gates of Camp Henry, convinced that some broad American conspiracy led to his wife's death.

The case may be closed, but the questions aren't going away.

"What can I say to my children?" he asked. "Will somebody please explain to me how this happened?"

(c) 2001 The Washington Post Company