Apology in Attempted Rape Case Includes Grisly Souvenir

The janitor and the young woman met in an evening English class at a local high school.

Both were Korean, and they soon became friends, studying their English lessons together. On April 19, Yoon No Yoon asked her for a ride to work, telling her his car was broken, sheriff’s deputies said. Yoon had to drive, he said, because the directions were so difficult. He drove instead to a spot near Zuma Beach, deputies say, where he began “making advances” at knifepoint, ripping her clothes.

She fought him off, police said, and when he took her home, she called the Rampart Division police station.

The attempted rape report was duly passed along to Malibu sheriff’s deputies, and there matters lay until Monday, police said, when the 31-year-old janitor telephoned the young woman’s home and said he wanted to apologize. According to police, Yoon asked the woman to meet him at McDonald’s in Koreatown.

Once again, the young woman called the Rampart station. On Monday night, she and her father went to the restaurant. So did police. The janitor from Seoul was already there, waiting to talk.

He never got the chance.

When police arrested Yoon, they found he had brought with him a manila envelope. Inside were two contrite letters written in Korean to the woman and--encased in an opaque crystal box--a more substantial token of his remorse.

“The officers opened (the box) up,” said Sgt. Alex Salazar, and inside, in a glass vial surrounded by a ring of small black glass beads, “there was a little pinky finger floating in some liquid.”

Yoon, whose left hand was bandaged from the amputation between the joints of the finger, was arrested and booked on suspicion of attempted rape, police said. His bail was set at $100,000. The fingertip is being kept as evidence by the Los Angeles County coroner’s office.

When Yoon was arrested, “he was confused that after he did what he did, cutting his finger and giving her this remorseful token, that she would get the police involved,” Salazar said. Yoon reportedly indicated as much to a Korean-speaking officer.

“This was a way for him to express his remorse,” Salazar said.

Not a Tradition

Although one police officer surmised that the act was a cultural ritual, experts say such a mutilation is no more a Korean cultural tradition than Vincent Van Gogh’s act of cutting off his ear for a woman was a Dutch or French tradition.

“Cutting off a finger, or self-mutilation in any form, is not a normal cultural act,” said Susan Chung, a psychiatrist at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Panorama City.

“In apologizing for some misbehavior, clearly, people don’t go through this kind of serious action,” said Chung, who counsels Korean patients, many of them recent immigrants.

Along with the possibility of Yoon’s agitated mental state, Chung said that such an extreme act might also stem from a cultural belief that someone who commits a shameful act should not require outside punishment in order to feel regret.

“Overall, in Korean culture, a shameful act should be handled inside the family or inside a very small circle of people,” Chung said, or “as in this case, apparently the individual was taking responsibility for criticizing and punishing himself.”

Modern Accounts

Dr. Byung-yul Yoon (no relation), clinical psychologist at the Asian Pacific Counseling and Treatment Center in Hollywood, said such behavior--cutting off half the small finger and offering it in apology--has been romanticized in modern accounts of Japanese gangster or “yakuza” activities, the only occasion the practice has surfaced recently.

Yoon No Yoon was being questioned by sheriff’s and district attorney’s investigators Tuesday evening. He was expected to be arraigned this morning.