Bullets End Immigrant’s Struggle : Crime: A Korean shopkeeper found shot to death in her car had striven for two decades to make a new life. Now her husband is left to wonder what it was all for.

Bo Im Ko came to America from South Korea, worked hard for 14 years and never made it.

In a grocery store parking lot in San Diego, the 56-year-old grandmother of four was found dead last month inside her old Oldsmobile, her body kneeling under the dashboard, covered with newspaper.

Up to her death, Ko’s experiences in America struck a familiar chord with emigrants from her native Korea. She left behind life as a housewife in a small island city near the 38th parallel to toil at jobs in an American garment factory, then at two gas stations, a coffee shop and, finally, her own doughnut shop.

The hours were long. Encounters with crime were many.

On March 26, Ko withdrew $40,000 from the bank, a routine errand made necessary by the check-cashing business she also ran at her small store in Gardena.

On the way to work, Ko disappeared. The two-day search for her drew in family and friends, and even the Los Angeles Korean media. By the time her car was spotted last Saturday in the Loma Portal area, her case was a cause celebre in Los Angeles’ Koreatown.

Police confirmed the worst: Ko had two bullet wounds in the back of her head, a third in the neck; it was probable that she was abducted and killed for her money.

Ko’s husband, Seung Il Kim, 61, was back at work on Avalon Boulevard in Gardena this week following his wife’s funeral. From his gas station office situated about 20 paces from the doughnut shop, Kim said the fantasy that lured him to America two decades ago has eluded him and his family.

What little savings he and Ko accumulated over the years were used to buy into a succession of financially fragile businesses, ending with the gas station and doughnut shop. Every business has come with the same nagging foe, Kim said: crime.

Crime always saw to it that the couple and their two children were left with little.

Finally, last week, murder took it all.

“We never had a chance to relax in America,” Kim said. “We often talked about going back to Korea. . . . If I go now, I go alone.”

In Ko, merchants see a prototype of themselves: vulnerable, embattled, prey to the violence that rules the street. They have been particularly anxious since the controversial sentencing of Soon Ja Du, a Korean-American grocer convicted of voluntary manslaughter in the March, 1991, shooting of a black teen-ager during a struggle at Du’s store.

Du received no jail term and was sentenced to five years’ probation. The decision set off protests by the slain girl’s family and black activists. Merchants say the rancor over the incident has contributed to a rash of violent crimes at Korean-American-owned small businesses in Los Angeles.

Since the shooting, authorities say, 10 Korean merchants have been killed in Los Angeles County during robberies. Arson fires damaged or destroyed Korean-owned stores five times in six months, according to police.

Police say the frequency with which Koreans are victimized may be due to their numbers--more than 2,500 Korean-owned businesses dot Los Angeles County, according to the Korean American Grocers Assn. of Southern California.

The seeming ubiquity of their shops, including many in high-crime areas, makes Koreans the target of thieves, said Detective James Chong of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Asian Crimes Investigation Section.

However, Korean merchants say racial motivation has often been overlooked by police detectives, who, in turn, point to the difficulty in determining hate as a motive for crime. County human relations officials say a fraction of actual hate crimes are reported.

For the past two years, Korean-Americans have topped the list of Los Angeles Asian groups victimized by hate crimes, according to a study by the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission. Of the 54 reported Asian hate crimes committed in 1991, 19 Korean-Americans were victims, the report says.

Merchants say cases such as Ko’s explain why they feel driven to carry weapons and to use them if necessary.

News of Ko’s murder renewed warnings to Korean merchants: Refrain from carrying large sums of money, conduct banking at different hours of the day, take different routes to and from the bank.

“Set no patterns,” admonished Detective James Chong of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Asian Crimes Investigation Section, who leads a three-detective team specializing in crimes against Korean-Americans.

Relatives say Ko rarely ventured from her route between her house in Cerritos, the bank, the supermarket and the doughnut shop. She had no known connection to San Diego, San Diego Police Sgt. Jim Munsterman said. In the month before the shooting, Ko twice told relatives that she suspected she was being followed, he said.

Once, about two weeks before the shooting, Ko told her family that two men followed her as she drove home. Instead of pulling into her driveway, Ko went to a relative’s home and waited for her husband to finish work at the gas station.

Ko’s shop was robbed last May, her husband said. Three men emptied the cash register, removed jewelry from six customers and employees, then manned the counter and began conducting business as they waited for Ko to arrive.

An hour later, Ko walked into the shop carrying about $100,000 for the check-cashing business, relatives said. Immediately, one man grabbed her purse and fled with the others. Apparently they knew Ko had been to the bank, Kim said.

No arrests have been made in the robbery, which Kim suspects is related to his wife’s murder.

“They must have followed her for a long time,” Kim said. “It seems like they knew exactly where she would be.”

Kim, who arrived in the United States in 1972, said he and his family have endured about a dozen major robberies and burglaries during the two decades.

“When we saved money, someone always seemed to take it,” Kim said. “When we worked hard, thieves made us work harder.”

In November, Kim wrote to the editor of the Korea Times, a Los Angeles newspaper. In his letter, he spoke with loathing about the danger that compels one Korean liquor store owner to don a bulletproof vest before greeting customers. He talked of his frustrations, including an incident in which thieves siphoned off $15,000 worth of gasoline from his four tanks.

Last week, Kim spoke about his bitterness over having spent decades of 12-hour workdays only to lose his wife, his savings and his faith in an immigrant work ethic that does not account for crime.

“After 20 years of trying my best to get along in America, I am a failed man,” Kim said. “I am wondering, if I stayed in Korea and worked this hard, would I be like this? A person with nothing?”