hankyoreh

The situation surrounding a two-year-old’s death in Ulsan has sparked Internet bulletin boards to fill with angry calls from citizens to find the cause of death, which is still unknown to police.

So-called ‘netizens’ suspect foul play, they say in their postings.

When the child did not feel well, a teacher, who is the husband of the director of the nursery, decided to take him to a hospital in Gyeongju. The child began vomiting severely after drinking soybean milk on the way, and was already dead when he arrived at the hospital.

According to police, the teacher told them, "As the child’s condition didn’t appear to be normal, I was bringing the child to the hospital in Gyeongju around 10 in that morning." Since his parents divorced, the child has lived at the children’s center except on the weekends.

One of the child’s family members raised the issue of the possibility of the child having been beaten by posting the child’s postmortem photo on the Internet and writing, "When he died, he had clear signs of bruises on his face and the back of his hand and his abdomen was swollen." The contents of his posting spread by word of mouth over the Internet, and now netizens - especially active in South Korea - have taken up the case.

The picture of the dead child with blackened eyes was posted throughout the Internet on chat sites and bulletin boards. "Ulsan nursery school" was at one point the most frequently searched phrase on Korean Internet portal sites. The Internet site of the Gyeongju Police was also flooded by comments posted by netizens demanding the police to clarify the exact cause of the child’s death.

An autopsy showed the child died from peritonitis caused by intestinal rupture. "The intestine ruptured due to an external shock to the child’s body," according to the doctor who conducted the autopsy as quoted in the police report. "Such a situation can occur after being beaten or after falling from a height. The symptoms can suddenly develop two or three days after the incident, with no prior abnormal conditions seen." The black eye could have happened due to a bruise on his forehead that could have moved downward to his eye area over time, the report added.

Accordingly, the cause of the intestinal rupture is not clear. The nursery school director and her husband have denied they beat the child. The brother of the dead child told the director and his wife that his brother fell from a piano around May 14, the police said.

The police have postponed announcement of the investigation until they get final results of the autopsy of the National Institute of Scientific Investigation (NISI) which are expected to come out early next week. "According to neighbors, the director couple has taken good care of the dead boy, and he reportedly liked them," said one of the police in charge of the case. "They are suspected to have possibly neglected the child’s symptoms at first, but there are no suspected circumstances regarding violent behavior," added the official.