‘Molar Daddy’ sentenced to death

A Seoul court on Wednesday meted out a death sentence for a man charged with killing a school friend of his daughter after sexually molesting her.

The Seoul Northern District Court handed down the gravest possible punishment to Lee Young-hak, 36, who had confessed to choking a 14-year-old girl to death in his home last September after committing lewd acts on her body while she was drugged.

Prosecutors had demanded the death penalty.

The court sentenced his daughter, whose identity was not revealed, to four years in prison for luring the friend to the house and helping her father dump her body. But her sentence can be extended up to six years in case of an infraction during her four-year imprisonment.

The killing shocked the nation as Lee was publicly known after appearing on a TV show in the 2000s which portrayed him as a poor man suffering from a rare dental disease while trying to eke out a living with a daughter who had the same incurable illness.

Lee earned the nickname of “Molar Daddy” after losing all but one molar while treating the disease.

Yonhap