Father Denies He Strangled Infant Son : Slaying: Officers theorize he was jealous of wife’s attention to the child. The recent Korean immigrant reportedly was unhappy in U.S.

A Rowland Heights theology student who emigrated from South Korea six months ago pleaded not guilty Monday to charges that he strangled his 4-month-old son while his wife was at work.

Chong Kuk Park, 30, who came to the United States after his church arranged his marriage to a Korean immigrant living here, entered the plea in Citrus Municipal Court in West Covina. He has been held without bail in County Jail since his arrest early last month, authorities said.

When sheriff’s deputies first received a 911 call on Sept. 5 from Park’s wife, they suspected that young Paul Sungjik Park was a victim of sudden infant death syndrome. But four days later they arrested the father, after an autopsy showed that the child’s 8-pound body had been severely battered, with compression marks ringing his tiny neck.

“Mr. Park was the sole person to have custody of the child that day,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard Burns said. “I’m also told there was an extensive history of prior injuries. . . . To me, this suggests there was an intentional murder.”

Park’s deputy public defender declined to comment on the case. In an interview last month with sheriff’s homicide investigators, however, Park said he had left the child unattended, returning to find a towel covering the baby’s face.

After prodding by officers, who took the unusual step of invoking a biblical passage about the evils of sin, Park reportedly broke into tears and admitted to having slapped both his wife and the baby a couple of days before the killing, police report shows.

When pressed for details, however, he spurned his Korean interpreter and in English shouted to investigators, “Where is your proof? Where is your proof?”

His wife, Mikyong, who has lived in the United States for 15 years, said she does not believe Park deliberately killed the child.

“It is very hard for me to understand,” she said. “I can’t say he killed the baby or not. I didn’t see. But how could this happen? I know he loved his son.”

Detectives theorize that Park, a brooding theologian whose entertainment consisted almost exclusively of watching religious broadcasts on cable TV, was jealous of his son and believed Mikyong loved the baby more than she loved him.

But Park’s story is also one of a troubled immigrant whose struggle here seems to have been compounded by a traditional Korean upbringing, one that taught him that a woman should serve a husband’s needs before fulfilling her own.

He sometimes complained that his wife was not subservient enough, the sheriff’s report shows. And Park, a former officer in the South Korean army, was uncomfortable with the idea that she worked all day selling discount clothes at a La Puente swap meet while he stayed home caring for their newborn son, his wife said.

“I thought it would pass when he got used to being here,” Mikyong said of her husband’s difficult adjustment to his new homeland. “But sometimes I got so depressed. He never wanted me to talk to anyone. Never leave the house. He just says, ‘Concentrate on your husband.’ ”

Mikyong, known to her friends as Mikki, met Park last year after the pastor at her Presbyterian church in Los Angeles asked if she wanted to get to know a nice Christian man from Seoul.

“I was looking for a very faithful, religious person, but I could not find anybody in L.A.,” said Mikyong, 30. “I was getting kind of late for marriage.”

During a 10-day stay in Seoul during the summer of 1989, they were married and she became pregnant. Mikyong said she returned alone to the United States, while Park waited for a visa. In April, one month before the baby was born, he arrived at their small apartment in the eastern San Gabriel Valley.

Park, who has a bachelor’s degree in engineering and a master’s in divinity, enrolled in a doctorate program at the Bethesda School of Theology in Whittier, which teaches all its classes in Korean. But he showed up only on the first day, said the school’s president, the Rev. Joseph Lee.

A week later, Park, sweating and frantic, arrived at his wife’s stall in La Puente’s Central Mercado with the body of their only child, the boy’s face pale and his lips blue. A sheriff’s deputy who arrived a few minutes later tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but Paul Sungjik Park was dead.