As the interrogation stretched into the wee hours of the night, Trapp pressed Cho. She didn’t believe Lee wanted to commit suicide, the detective said. He had purchased plane tickets to return to South Korea and sent his wife flowers and a letter saying he was coming home, Trapp pointed out.
Cho’s story grew stranger. While maintaining that Lee wanted to die, he began enumerating reasons he’d grown to resent his longtime friend over the years. Cho said his family lost their home to debt collectors in South Korea years ago as a result of a bad business deal Lee made, for which Cho was the guarantor. In recent months, Cho said, Lee was blackmailing him, threatening to get Cho and his family deported from the U.S. if Cho didn’t go along with his demands.
Then about a month before his death, Lee came over to Cho’s home to drink and passed out on the couch. In the middle of the night, Cho said, he awoke to find Lee, drunk and naked, in their bedroom. Lee, he said, was sexually assaulting his wife. Embarrassed, confused and afraid, Cho said he pretended to be asleep.
“I want to know,” Trapp responded, “as a husband, a father, as a man, as the head of the household, how did you feel?”
“I wanted to kill him,” Cho said.
Cho’s first-degree murder trial began this month in a top-floor courtroom in downtown Santa Ana.
Suicide is a sign of failure of moral upbringing, so it stigmatizes the whole family.
Cho’s defense attorney, deputy public defender Robert Kohler, told the mostly non-Korean jury that cultural context could help them make sense of what may seem an improbable story.
Kohler also called to the stand Cho’s wife. The woman looked neither at her husband, who wiped away tears with trembling hands in the defendant’s seat, nor at the jurors weighing his fate as she testified in a barely audible voice.
Years ago in South Korea, she said, Lee made a pass at her, which she rejected. Then about a month before his death, Lee drunkenly came into the room where she and her husband were sleeping and touched her inappropriately, the woman said. She fought him, but didn’t make a sound or wake her husband because she was ashamed, she said. In the following weeks, Lee raped her, she said. Twice. But she never told her husband about any of the incidents.
On Monday, he took the stand in his own defense.
Right up to the last moment, he never thought Lee would go through with the plan, Cho said.
“Whether I liked him or I hated him, he was a friend,” he said. "I was begging him, let's stop this. I was trying to save him."
“Were you thinking of saving him when you put the gun to the back of his head and pulled the trigger?” Deputy Dist. Atty. Scott Simmons asked.
Cho testified that it was only when Lee insulted his wife and his daughter that he pulled the trigger.
If jurors decide Cho did not intend to kill his friend until the moment he pulled the trigger, that he shot in the “heat of passion,” they have the option of finding him guilty of voluntary manslaughter. If they doubt that story and instead find that he decided earlier to kill the man, they could convict him of first-degree murder, for which he could get up to a life sentence. Jurors began deliberating Thursday morning.
Whatever they decide, the friendship that spanned more than three decades, survived financial debacles and crossed the Pacific ends with one dead on a roadside in Anaheim and the other in a California prison cell.
Cho said he left behind the man he once considered closer than his siblings and his parents, even his wife, and drove into the night, not once looking back.
“I realized, I did it,” he said. “I did it.”
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