CHRISTINE: This is a picture of my mom.
Brings up a lot of bad memories.
[sniffles]
I just feel like, I don't know, I just...
just a very scary person, and just
reminded of all that when I see this.
Just makes me think about just, like, how
horrible she was and everything she's done.
But yeah, it's hard to look at,
um, her.
This is where I was shot
when I was
going back from calling 911.
She had completely shot through my elbow,
and my arm was fractured and flopping around.
I have a big scar down my stomach here,
from here to probably here.
I have another, like a bullet entry,
exit wound here and out through my chest.
Sungnam Kwon is the woman who gave birth to me.
It feels weird to say her name.
I hated my mom.
I think my mom is evil.
She tortured us.
You hear the noise first,
loud bang,
and then just the sensation of, like, water being poured on
you, but it's warm, and it's my blood, and it's everywhere.
She chose to do what she did,
and it was evil.
[The Paper Chase's "What's So Amazing About Grace?" plays]
[strings continue playing sinister tune]
[static crackling]
[knock at door] [creaking]
-[banging on door] -[creaking]
[water dripping]
[banging on door] [creaking]
[sinister chord strikes]
This is a picture of my parents together
on a boat in Korea.
Looks like a work event.
My dad was an American working in Korea
when he met my mom, Sungnam.
They both loved each other a lot in the beginning.
But then certainly, you don't treat someone
you love the way she treated my dad.
She got a full scholarship to, like,
one of the best colleges in Korea.
So I think, at one time, she was a smart,
brave, and confident lady.
And eventually, she just...
changed
and was an unrecognizable person from the person he met.
Ultimately, she became...
a monster.
I always wondered, like, how is this gonna end?
Because it just gets more and more extreme every time.
But I never thought she would do what she did.
Myself, my sister, and my dad
all didn't realize what was happening with my mom.
It was a slow and steady buildup.
I learned that my mom was very selfish.
Everything had to be her way.
My mom would make me wake up early,
I think it was around 6 AM, and practice piano
for an hour every -- every morning.
-[discordant piano notes] -One and two, three, four.
My mom would be standing directly behind
and to the right of me.
She would be holding her stick and keeping the beat of
whatever I was playing.
AS SUNGNAM: And two, three, four.
Any time I slouched a little or played the wrong note,
she would hit me and make me start over again.
I just thought that's what happens when you mess up.
Again!
VICTORIA: We just accepted it as normal.
One and two, three...
I didn't tell anybody, because my dad was
often at work, and she told us
not to tell people, so I didn't.
Three, four.
VICTORIA: My mom never asked if we wanted to play the piano.
She just forced us to do it, because that's what she wanted.
This was more than a mom who wants their kid
to have a hobby.
The only reason she beat me and forced me to practice
so much and so hard is because it made her look good.
We would have recitals, piano recitals,
which is why she made us practice so much.
It meant a lot to her to tell people that
I won a gold first place trophy at a piano recital.
She felt that she was better than everyone.
And then she would tell that to us.
She said things like, "You're special.
You're not like these people, like, you're better."
We recognized that we have
a very different life than everyone else,
but it wasn't better.
It was not better. It was worse.
One day, my sister and I were arguing, like sisters do.
Give me the marker back.
My mom said, like, you have
to apologize and be the bigger person.
I didn't want to, because she was definitely wrong.
And she was, like, egging me on all day.
She never shares!
VICTORIA: I told my mom it was unfair.
I knew immediately from her face and just
her demeanor that something bad was gonna happen.
When my mother was really upset,
like, her lips would tighten,
her face would change.
Her body would be, like, stiffer,
her eyes looked different.
And then she started hitting my sister,
beating her, like with her fists.
Stop! Mommy! Stop! Stop!
She was wailing on my sister.
I didn't know what to do. I was completely helpless.
[child screams]
It was really scary.
And my sister was, like, on the ground,
just cowered and trying to protect herself,
and she wasn't stopping.
And, uh...
I screamed, like, stop, you're gonna kill her.
Stop! Stop, mommy!
And she said, "See what happens when
you don't take responsibility?"
Then she just walked out, and...
my sister and I were both just crying.
My dad was either traveling or just at work,
and so my dad had no idea that it happened.
CHRISTINE: I do not remember that.
There are a lot of things I don't remember.
I think either I try to block it out.
It's just a coping mechanism, where we try
not to remember what happened to us.
She got angrier
if, you know, one of us would
intervene and try to help the other.
She would have this punishment in mind,
and then if something, you know, disrupted that,
then it would escalate even further.
I just remember being really scared.
VICTORIA: So I was sleeping over at my friend's house.
It was like late at night, and his mom comes in.
"We have to go back to your house," and I thought it was
pretty strange.
I get to the house, and the police are there.
My dad had a black eye, and he had, like,
a cut on his face, on his cheek.
I had never seen my dad hurt before,
physically -- I was concerned and wondering
and confused why he looked like that.
I don't remember seeing my mom, maybe she was off in
another room.
So when I finally got a chance to talk to my dad,
I asked him what happened, and he said he ran into a tree
or bumped into a door,
and that's how he got the cut on his face
and the black eye and the ripped shirt.
I think he protected her, too,
like from the cops.
We never talked about it.
It was just...
never talked about or discussed or explained.
Just went on with our lives.
He endured that for
my sister and I,
but I just always -- it was like this
deep fear, like, what's gonna happen next time.
There was no way I could imagine what
was gonna happen in the coming days.
When I look at this photo,
it makes me feel the way I did when the picture was taken,
which was that I was embarrassed of her
all the time.
And I didn't want to be around her.
I hated being around her.
I've hated her for most of my life
that I can remember, because she was
always just forcing me to do things that I didn't want
to do, yelling at my dad, and being violent.
And so I hated her from a pretty young age.
By the time I got to high school,
my parents had grown pretty distant,
and my dad was traveling a lot more.
I think my mom purposely beat us
when my dad wasn't around, like,
when he was at work or away on travel or whatever.
The erratic behavior was increasing and getting worse.
You never knew what would set her off.
It could be the stupidest thing.
My sister and I fought about something
that I don't remember,
and she got really mad at us.
She beat us and then told us to go in the garage
and hold our hands up and not touch the door
and not talk to each other until she let us out.
And she was very specific about that.
I always wanted to just go along with what
she said, because I knew otherwise, it would be worse.
It was summer, it was hot.
She had turned the lights off, so it was dark.
CHRISTINE: I don't think anything surprised me in terms
of what sort of punishment she would have for us.
We were terrified of her and whatever her response would be
if we did open the door.
We were terrified that she'd come at any time and then beat
the [bleep] out of us.
CHRISTINE: How long was she gonna have a stay there?
I just remember sitting there for, I mean,
it must have been hours.
And then eventually, we kind of were like, okay,
I don't think she's coming back.
VICTORIA: So eventually,
we did open the door and went upstairs, and she wasn't home.
Who does that to their own kid or anybody,
but also their own kid?
I mean, that's almost like how prisoners
and...torture -- that's the type
of abuse I feel like she did to us.
It's just another example of how
she is a psychopath.
My sister and I were late in the morning,
and we missed the bus.
I think my mom was mad that we missed the bus, like,
more than once that week, and now she had to drive us again.
She is flooring it and turning the steering wheel
as hard as she can left and right.
It was such an extreme reaction for something
that seemed so, you know, normal, and it was an accident.
You know, we missed the bus.
We weren't the only kids who have ever done that before.
She was swerving so bad that
it was, like, lifting off the ground,
and she was just berating us.
CHRISTINE: We were weaving in and out of the road.
She was yelling at us, saying like, "Is this what you want?"
Mom, stop!
CHRISTINE: We were crying, because we were so afraid.
I remember us telling her to stop and slow down.
She didn't seem to care about our safety or anything.
She was acting insane.
She didn't care if we lived or died.
It was just like pure terror,
and my heart's beating fast just thinking about it.
I thought she was gonna kill us.
We pull up to the school, and she's just basically like,
"Get out."
I didn't tell my teacher or anybody.
I didn't think they would understand.
Things got worse and more chaotic
and, um, violent.
I tried my best to feel normal, but...
but it was very obvious that it wasn't normal.
My mom would go out a lot with her friends,
drinking and partying and doing whatever she wanted.
She spent so much money on herself and clothes.
We were deeply, like, going into debt,
and the bank was threatening to take the house.
My dad confronted her about her partying
and never being there.
AS JOHN: What do you think, I'm a bank?!
AS SUNGNAM: Hey!
VICTORIA: She started chasing him around the house.
When she caught up to him, she started punching him.
-AS SUNGNAM: Come back here! -No, get away from me!
She was punching him -- he was trying to defend himself
and tried to catch her wrist as she was punching him.
But that just made her more angry
and more determined to hurt him.
It just seemed like when she would get to that point,
it didn't matter to her that we were standing right there.
Kind of like...
witnessing a car crash.
She got upset that he was resisting her beating.
Let go of me!
[breathing heavily]
And she said, "I'm gonna call the cops," and then
she went and called the cops, and the cops came.
She's telling them that he's beating her
and that he's abusive.
She was trying to make it seem like he was an abusive dad.
And just now, he tried to hit me!
That's not true!
VICTORIA: I actually said, like, she's lying.
The police asked me what happened, and I said I was
here the entire time, I saw the whole thing.
She was the aggressor.
She tried to hit him and punch him and chase him around,
and then she threatened to call the police
and say that he did it.
Then they just left without helping
us or my dad,
and it was really frustrating
that they didn't
seem to think it was a big deal.
It just cemented the fact that
there was really nothing we could do.
Like it was like this bomb.
Like you don't want to set it off or you don't want to
disturb it, because it's gonna go off.
I remember one night, my parents were fighting
about money.
He couldn't keep up with her spending.
So he said, "I'm gonna cancel your card."
And she left the room for a minute
and came back with a knife,
and at one point,
she had him pinned, like, against a wall,
and then she cut him on his cheek
with the knife,
and he was begging her to stop.
He was crying, he was terrified.
Like, we were all terrified of her.
I don't think she could control her rage.
[crying quietly]
The whole situation was --
just seemed out of control.
We were just in shock and like horror,
watching this unfold.
My dad being that scared it -- it was just --
it was terrifying for me
and also, you know, really sad that, you know, that he could --
he had to be scared of his wife.
Things were escalating.
She wasn't afraid to take the violence to the next level.
I would never think that she --
that it would go as far as it did
and that she would do what she did.
VICTORIA: He was begging for her to stop
and crying, and she could sense almost,
like an animal,
like that she had defeated him.
And she just backed off.
CHRISTINE: Leading up to Christmas,
my dad had been gone a lot longer for his trips.
So he had been going to China a lot more often and, you know,
it would be like weeks where he was there, but he was gonna
be back, you know, for the holidays.
A couple of weeks before he was coming back to Illinois,
I was in his computer room, and I saw some papers
that were in the printer,
and I saw that it was an email from my dad to my mom.
Basically, it said that he had met someone in China,
that he wanted a divorce,
and that he wanted to take my sister and I
to China to live with him.
It was a huge turning point for my mom, because...
she could feel, like, her control slipping away,
and she wasn't gonna let that happen.
VICTORIA: My mom
was acting completely different
than she normally does.
She kept insisting that we all go
to dinner as a family, which we did.
After that, she wanted to play games together as a family,
which we hadn't done since probably I was seven or so.
All right, who's thirsty?
VICTORIA: And she prepares, like, snacks,
like a tray with cokes for each
of us with ice and a bowl of chips or something like that.
And she was acting all jovial and happy
and laughing and...
It was just very strange, and she
was just trying to act like this
happy lady with a perfect family, I guess.
It was just so...
odd for her to act the way that she was.
We looked closer at the coke and saw
some kind of white something at the bottom.
At that point, we thought definitely,
you know, something was -- something was going on.
VICTORIA: We both realized she drugged the cokes.
So we kind of just took little tiny sips just
so it wouldn't be obvious to my mom that we knew.
Um, but my dad had no idea and didn't suspect
anything, and he drank, like, he drank the entire coke.
ACTOR AS JOHN: Oh, that hit the spot.
Well, I hope so.
VICTORIA: It just felt like a nightmare, seeing him
finish the whole coke.
All right, girls. Whose turn now?
VICTORIA: I wish I could have...
taken out of his hand and dumped it down the drain
and said...
"Mom's trying to poison and kill you," but
she was right there, so I couldn't do anything.
After playing the game,
he was tired and wanted to go to sleep.
I went upstairs with Christine and my dad,
and we sat on his bed,
and he was laying down, because he was sleepy.
And I said to him, "I think mom's trying to kill you."
And he just chuckled, and he said, "Haha, I hope not."
And he was falling asleep as he said that.
CHRISTINE: I was terrified for my dad.
And I just remember we were
just, like, pleading that he would just...
just, like, you know, stay in a hotel or be -- even if
it was with us or by himself, just not be there.
I think we just knew, like, something was gonna happen.
This is a picture of our house.
So, yeah, this is where, you know, we lived, um,
when it all happened, and it looks like this
is actually probably the day that it happened,
um, since there's Christmas wreaths and everything,
the caution tape.
Christmas is hard, but so is, like, pretty much every holiday,
um, just because, yeah, I mean,
it's hard to see other people with their families.
Um... [sniffles] Yeah.
VICTORIA: On Christmas morning, my sister and I
woke up at the same time,
and we wished each other Merry Christmas.
CHRISTINE: I remember waking up and feeling
just really tired and not normal.
I didn't put the two together, that it
might have been from the drink the night before.
And then we heard a noise from downstairs.
[crashing noise]
It sounded like a pot falling
and hitting the ground and clattering.
And we both, like, stopped and looked at each other,
and we were like, what was that?
CHRISTINE: To me, it sounded kind of
like those little poppers with the streamers.
Then, within a few minutes,
our mom was in our doorway, and she was,
you know, fiddling with something in her hand.
AS SUNGNAM: Sorry.
And she just keeps saying, "I'm so sorry."
And then I realized she had a gun.
Please forgive me.
[two gunshot blasts]
She unloaded all the rounds
at me. -[gunshots blasting]
I was hit...
I think seven times.
You hear the noise first, loud bang,
[gunshot blasts]
and then just the sensation of, like, water being poured on you,
but it's warm, and it's my blood,
and it's everywhere.
And then the pain and the smell
of, like, my flesh burning and the gunpowder.
I just remember being in complete shock,
not knowing what to do.
I just kind of froze,
but then she was reloading.
And my sister said, "Christine, you have to go.
You have to call the cops."
I have to get to the phone, which was past my mom.
She was still in the doorway,
and then I just had to get around her.
I kind of just brushed past her.
When I called 911, I said, "We need help.
Our mom is shooting at us."
I really don't remember being on the phone with them too long
before my mom came in the doorway, and she had the gun.
So I ran past my mom.
Then, you know, she started shooting at me.
[three gunshot blasts]
I could see that my arm was, like, flopping around.
She had completely shot through my elbow,
and my arm was fractured and flopping around.
VICTORIA: I asked her, "Did you call the police?"
And she said yes.
Then I heard the sirens, and then I heard her
shoot herself once.
[gunshot blasts]
[distant sirens wailing]
And I knew she shot herself, because I heard her scream.
We just laid there, bleeding,
and...
not knowing if we were gonna live or die.
And I told her, I loved her,
and she said, "I love you, too."
I was unconscious.
I don't know how long till I woke up in the hospital later.
Well, I remember being questioned by police.
At that point, they had told me about my dad,
and I remember just crying, because
I was just, like, in complete shock.
[voice breaking] Just didn't expect that.
The sounds that we heard in the morning,
that was probably when my mom was shooting my dad.
She had shot him first.
And then she came after us after that.
When I woke up in the ICU in a private room,
I was alone and had no idea
where my dad was or my sister.
When my mom shot me,
I put my hands up to defend myself.
And one of the bullets went through
the three of my fingers on my left hand,
and they were dangling by the skin.
Um, she also hit me multiple times
in the abdomen and chest and lungs.
There's metal plates and screws
to -- because the bone, there was no bone to even
put back together.
The metal is what's supporting fingers.
And then this one, there's nothing really they
could do, so it's just what was left.
And, uh, there was metal pins --
there's a metal pin that goes through my finger.
No, I didn't care.
I mean, I figured she was alive, because I heard her in
the room next to me or in the ER,
but yeah, I didn't ask about my mom, because I didn't really
care if she was...
if she survived or not.
After we recovered,
I and my sister went to live with my aunt and uncle.
I googled it myself,
what had happened to my dad and how he passed away.
The article online said he was sitting
at his desk early that morning and working,
and she came into the room and shot him
in the back of the head and back.
I think five times, it said.
[gunshot blasts]
How do you react to that?
It's like Jesus Christ. What a monster.
I totally think that
she was sane, and she chose to do what she did,
and it was evil.
This is a picture of my mom's mug shot
after she got out of the hospital.
Her eyes look
different than I ever saw them.
They just look...
sad.
I'd see her smile and pretend to be happy or...
pose for a camera
or be angry.
But I've never seen her really look like that before.
I didn't think she had that in her to be sad.
You can't just kill somebody
and then try to kill your daughters
and not go to jail.
So, when I see this, um...
Yeah... [sniffles]
I mean...
just makes me think about just, like, how
horrible she was and everything she's done.
I mean, clearly this is, you know,
after everything happened, and...
I was taken by the police.
But yeah, it's hard to look at...
um, her.
We never visited her.
Uh, she tried to contact us, sent us letters.
So these are the kinds of letters that she would send.
Says, "Dearest Christine,
"congratulations on your graduation, baby.
"Good luck in your endless bright futures.
"God bless you and peace to you, Doc.
You are my proud Doc. Love, Mom Sungnam."
Um, yeah, I mean, she would just --
said stuff like this all the time.
It really didn't mean a lot to me.
You know, she could say she's proud of us and things,
but like clearly,
um...just...
After everything she did, there's nothing she could say
to make anything -- you know, anything better.
I never remember her saying sorry in the letters.
I stopped reading them.
It's just, you know, like what is the point of this?
She's not trying to take any responsibility,
even though she did all those horrible things.
[sniffles]
VICTORIA: Recently, I found out my mom passed away in prison.
And it wasn't until a few weeks after that
when I asked my uncle how she died,
and he told me she committed suicide.
She used a bed sheet and tied it around her neck
from the bunk above her,
and she was on her knees,
and that was her decision,
and all of the other things she did were her decision,
as well, so I feel really
no sadness.
CHRISTINE: I feel like I've been waiting
for that for a long time.
I -- honestly, I'm really relieved,
because there's, you know,
like, no more damage she can do.
I feel like now that she's gone, you know,
we do have closure.
VICTORIA: My dad, John Paul Lisowski, was a great man.
He was incredibly intelligent.
He was funny. He...
is my dad.
He's the one that -- the only person
that protected us from my mom
and supported us and...
It's just really hard to go
through life without somebody like that.
The main thing that always kept me going, even
in my deepest depression, was the hope that one day,
it could be better.
There's a way out, and nothing is impossible.
You can have a happy life
and the life you've always dreamed of.
I just bought a house on the water,
which has been my dream forever.
I still have regular therapy sessions, uh, once a week,
and I feel happy
and loved and safe, and...
I'm really close with my sister.
She's eight months pregnant, and I can't wait
to be an aunt for the first time.
CHRISTINE: I want to be a mom who's, I mean,
really the opposite of the mom that I had.
I don't think I will tell my daughter
about her grandmother,
um, until she asks.
I'm not looking forward to that day.
I would love to tell her about her grandfather.
[sniffling]
[crying quietly]
So, yeah, that's...
more of the conversation that I'm looking
forward to having with her one day.