South Korean drivers cleared in death of woman who leapt from taxi, fearing kidnapping

[riceberry]

South Korean drivers cleared in death of woman who leapt from taxi, fearing kidnapping​

• Thursday, 20 Feb 2025
  
  4:10 PM

SEOUL: On March 4, 2022, a female college student jumped out of a taxi in the middle of an expressway, mistakenly thinking she was being kidnapped. She was fatally hit by another vehicle.

Late last month, the Supreme Court ruled that the two drivers charged in her death – the taxi driver and the driver of the car that hit her – were not responsible for it.

According to court officials on Feb 18, the taxi driver, who is in his 80s, was acquitted of involuntary manslaughter charges. The other driver involved in the incident, who had hit the victim, was also cleared of any wrongdoing. The Supreme Court upheld the rulings of two lower courts in the case.

According to the court rulings and local media reports of the accident, the victim, who was enrolled in an undisclosed university, got into the defendant’s taxi at Pohang Station in Pohang, North Gyeongsang province, and asked him to take her to her college dormitory.

The driver misheard her destination and asked her if she was headed for Handong Global University, which was much farther than her intended destination. She also misheard him and agreed.

The driver took an expressway to Handong University, which struck the victim as strange, since the short route from the station to her university did not include taking an expressway. She addressed this concern to the driver, who failed to hear her words due to noise.

This situation led to a fatal misunderstanding of the driver’s intent, and led to the victim jumping out of the car in the middle of the expressway. The SUV behind the taxi ended up hitting her.

A police investigation of the taxi’s black box confirmed that the victim had said yes to the taxi driver’s inquiry about the wrong destination, and also found that the victim’s questions over the wrong route were audible only after the officers repeatedly played the recording.

“The defendant perceived (the victim’s) destination to be another university’s dorm, and drove the taxi on a conventional route to this university... He could not at all have expected that the victim would jump out of the taxi going over 80 kmh,” the appellate court had said in its ruling.

Regarding the driver of the SUV, the court said it would have been impossible to anticipate that someone would have fallen out of the vehicle in front of them, particularly since the incident happened at night in an area with no streetlights.

South Korea’s highest court rejected the prosecution’s challenge of an earlier verdict, saying the court did not make any mistakes interpreting the law to reach its ruling. - The Korea Herald/ANN