Police arrested two women in the Little Neck neighborhood of Queens, New York, last Wednesday after they were accused of beating four children at a tutoring center targeting young Korean students, reported the New York Times.
Min Kyung Chea, the president of Crown Academy, and her employee, Sun Kyung Park, are facing a number of child endangerment and assault charges concerning four children between the ages of 9 and 11.
The women are accused of beating one boy with the metal end of a spiral notebook and also hitting three others. Students were allegedly forced to stand while holding piles of books above their heads, and were sometimes denied food and bathroom visits, leading some to urinate in their seats, say the allegations reported by the New York Times.
Chea, 34, and Park, 33, who were both released on bail of $1,000 and $5,000, respectively, have denied the charges through their attorney Dennis J. Ring, who told the presiding judge the allegations were “wholly unsupported.”
The allegations first came to light after a nanny for some of the students—whose parents reside in South Korea—reported suspicions about the abuse, said the Times article. Tutoring centers like Crown tend to hire these so-called “homestay mothers,” as they’re called, who provide the students from abroad food and lodging.
Not only are officials with Crown Academy denying the charges, they are also accusing the homestay mother who raised the abuse suspicions of fabricating the story because of a grievance she has with the school. Allan Jennings, the academy’s spokeperson, told the the New York Times that the nanny “made her allegations after the academy refused to pay her 10 months of fees in advance, and two months after she claimed she saw injuries on one of the boys.”
But Megan Rha, an attorney representing the mothers of two children involved in the case, said her clients recently flew in from South Korea after some disturbing conversations with their sons over Skype about their treatment at the school, said the Times story.
Kevin Ryan, a spokesman for the Queens district attorney’s office, also said Chea and Park seemed to perceive their actions as disciplining the students for “misbehaving, for bad grades on tests or for being too loud.”
Top photo via New York Times: Crown Academy head Min Kyung Chea (left), with employee Sun Kyung Park and academy spokesman Allan Jennings, outside court.
