The news of that day has passed, but its meaning remains with us today. "That Day, Today" reads the present through the records of the past.
Sept. 18, 2022. A civil servant accused of killing a delivery rider by throwing a curbstone onto a road was again sentenced to prison in an appeals trial. The 1-2 criminal division of the Daejeon High Court sentenced the defendant, identified as A and in their 50s, to four years in prison on a charge of inflicting bodily injury resulting in death — the same term handed down by the lower court.
At around 1 a.m. on Nov. 6, 2021, A was walking along a sidewalk in Wolpyeong-dong, Seo-gu, Daejeon, when they threw a curbstone measuring 44 centimeters long and 12 centimeters high, which had been lying next to a roadside tree, onto a four-lane road for no apparent reason. B, a person in their 20s who was riding a motorcycle on the road while making a delivery, could not avoid it and was thrown off after hitting it. B was taken to a nearby hospital immediately after the accident but later died. B was known to have run a snack shop as a young business owner, deepening public grief over the case.
In police questioning, A said they had been drunk at the time and that they "had no intent to commit the crime." A also cited a history of psychiatric treatment in claiming diminished mental capacity. Contrary to that account, however, A's actions captured on closed-circuit television footage showed willful negligence. In the footage, A stood nearby after throwing the curbstone onto the road and watched the spot where it lay for a considerable time. Minutes later, when B's motorcycle hit the curbstone and went down, A left the scene in a hurry without providing any assistance, boarding a taxi that A had not called by pretending to be the passenger who had booked it.
The appellate court rejected the appeals filed by both A and prosecutors, saying it did not find that "the lower court's sentence was so light or so heavy as to fall outside the reasonable bounds of discretion."
The court noted that "the CCTV footage analyzed by the National Forensic Service shows that, given factors such as the motorcycle's speed, the defendant could have foreseen that the rider might die from injuries including head trauma, yet the defendant neither provided assistance nor called 119, and instead hurriedly left the scene in a taxi the defendant had not booked." It added that in setting the sentence, it had "comprehensively taken into account that the defendant had no criminal record and that the crime was unpremeditated, even though the victim's life ended at a young age, an irreversible outcome."
The number of delivery workers has risen steadily, from 264,000 in 2023 to 330,000 in 2024 and 366,000 last year. Over the same period, casualties from traffic accidents involving delivery riders increased from 6,534 to 6,692 and then 6,745, heightening the need for accident prevention. Workplace fatalities among quick-service couriers, a category that includes delivery riders, numbered 38 in 2023 and 32 in 2024 before rising to 40 last year.
