Guilty Plea Entered by Grocer in Girl’s Death

Moments before he was to stand trial on charges that might send him to prison for life, a Highland Park grocer pleaded guilty Monday to shooting a teenager to death last fall after a confrontation with one of her friends.

Korea Jo Won Kim was immediately sentenced by Superior Court Judge Robert J. Perry to a prison term of 15 years to life--a sentence that came on the Korean immigrant’s 52nd birthday.

Kim was arrested Nov. 21 when he shot and killed 17-year-old Brenda Hughes after a dispute inside the store with three of her teenage companions.

As authorities would later learn through interviews and a store surveillance camera, the three youths entered Kim’s market on Avenue 56 about 9:30 a.m. and were about to leave when the store owner questioned one of the teenagers about taking a can of beer.

A security camera, police said, showed the boy handing over the beer to Kim and then holding open his jacket, apparently to prove that he had not shoplifted any other item.

But when the youths left the store, Kim followed them. And in a second confrontation, he pulled out a .45-caliber pistol and fired three shots at the car as it drove away.

One of the bullets fatally wounded Hughes, a former Franklin High School cheerleader and college-bound student who had not left the car to enter the store.

In the days and weeks after the shooting, authorities and those familiar with the Highland Park grocery noted that Kim and his wife had been a frequent mark for shoplifting teenagers as they passed by the store to and from school.

And later, as it became clear that Kim would face murder charges in the incident, his previous defense attorneys offered several explanations for his actions. Among them: Kim acted out of a fear that one of the teenagers was armed with a handgun.

In March, a Municipal Court judge ruled that authorities had sufficient evidence to prosecute Kim--not only for murder but on four counts of attempted murder for firing at the car full of teenagers, one of whom was slightly wounded by the same bullet that killed Hughes.

But Monday, as attorneys for both sides were preparing to select a jury, Kim agreed to plead guilty to the second-degree murder charge. In exchange, the district attorney’s office dropped the four charges of attempted murder.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Pat Dixon described the outcome as logical and just, concluding that the prosecution had managed to obtain about the same prison sentence for Kim that he might have received had he been convicted at trial.

“We got a second-degree murder conviction, and in my view that is all this case ever was,” Dixon said. “I am not sure I could have felt good about standing before a jury and calling this a first-degree murder.”

A second-degree murder case does not require proving an intent to kill, Dixon said, but attempted murder does. As a result, Dixon said, he is not sure Kim could have been convicted on the four additional counts of attempted murder. More likely, Dixon said, Kim would have been convicted on the lesser charge of assault with a deadly weapon. Such a conviction might have added only a few extra years to Kim’s sentence.

Kim’s attorney, meanwhile, said he was pleased with the plea and sentence. He said his client, with no criminal record, could be eligible for parole in nine years.

“I would have been much more pleased, obviously, if we would have gone to trial and won,” said attorney H. Russell Halpern. “But you never know what can happen at trial and in this case, the stakes were very high.”

Given the number of charges facing Kim, Halpern said, the shop owner faced the possibility of being convicted on a series of charges that could have meant a virtual life sentence.

“For all practical purposes,” Halpern said, “he would not have gotten out of prison during his lifetime if he had been convicted of all the charges.”