By Jordan Baker
Master Lion spent his days surrounded by children.
He held school holiday workshops at his taekwondo studio, with Nerf gun challenges and mini Olympics. He ran birthday parties. He hosted maths and English tutoring programs. He posted videos of “Little Lions”, his youngest students.
Lion’s Taekwondo studio chief instructor, Master Lion Yoo; police established a crime scene in North Parramatta on Tuesday.Credit: Rhett Wyman / Lion's Taekwondo studio
And yet, Master Lion, the man they all looked up to – real name Kwang Kyung Yoo – is accused of killing one of those students with his own hands inside his Parramatta dojang on Monday night. The boy was strangled. He was just seven years old.
Police also accuse Yoo of murdering a woman, Min Cho, at the dojang that same night, before taking her white BMW X5 to her Baulkham Hills townhouse and killing her husband Steven, a highly respected construction manager.
“There [were] no warnings from what we have gathered so far. It was out of the blue,” said Homicide Squad commander Detective Superintendent Danny Doherty on Wednesday.
The deaths have shocked Sydney. Police have not revealed a motive, although friends say Min Cho’s shyness and the pride and affection Steven Cho displayed for his wife on social media suggest a love triangle is unlikely.
For many parents, who regularly trust their children to extracurricular tutors, the case has raised frightening questions about how a man whose career and business revolved around teaching children could be charged with killing a seven-year-old boy.
For a family looking for a martial arts studio, Yoo’s would have seemed a good choice. He promoted an impressive resume, which pointed to qualifications from top-tier universities, myriad competition victories and selection for the 2000 Olympics.
His dojang appeared popular too. The website for Lion’s taekwondo studio in North Parramatta shows pictures of happy, well-behaved children practising martial arts in their little white suits. It also offers holiday camps and birthday parties crowded with balloons.
Every afternoon, it runs two hours of classes for Little Lion Kids – aged five to 12 – and another for Lion teens, before an adult class at 6.30pm.
Steven Cho and Min Cho were killed earlier this week.Credit: Nine
As his website and social media profile pointed out, Yoo had also spent years running classes for neurodivergent students at a local high school, a job that gave him another layer of legitimacy and suggested he had a Working with Children Check (WWCC).
His Facebook page – which was taken down on Thursday night – shows reels of children practising martial arts, interspersed with intense, muscular images of him training and an occasional video with his own family. “Having a precious time with my treasures,” he wrote.
But a closer look reveals Yoo is not all he claimed.
He was never selected for the Sydney Olympics, Australian Taekwondo said in a statement. His claim to be a professor at Macquarie University – he even posted an application to be a “distinguished professor” on his social media – was also kiboshed by the university.
Police officers near the building where Steven Cho was killed in Baulkham Hills on Wednesday.Credit: Kate Geraghty
Sydney University had no records to support his claims that he was studying a PhD in sports science.
He is not a member of the Australian Taekwondo governing body and the dojang is not an affiliated club. Practitioners don’t have to be, and his site doesn’t make the claim, but membership provides an extra layer of protection because affiliates must abide by integrity policies.
None of this suggests a tendency to violence. But it’s odd, and it might have been a red flag for customers if they’d known about it.
The case also highlights the limitations of screening systems such as WWCC, which are designed to protect children from people who have come to police attention for crimes against minors, ranging from sexual to physical.
‘What the Working With Children Check does is give us a false sense of security.’
Janise Mitchell, deputy CEO of Australian Childhood Foundation
Screening systems can only pick up red flags or patterns of behaviour that are already on record; they are not judges of character or predictors of the future.
Late last year, a young man who had been hired as a sports assistant at a Sydney private school violently murdered a young female sports coach, who was just 21 years old, in the school’s gymnasium toilets, before taking his own life. He had a WWCC too.
Kim Dilati from Sydney Clinical and Forensic Psychology said the WWCC system was not designed to identify people with underlying issues. “There’s no way of screening for them,” she said. “They often go unnoticed until it’s too late.”
Janise Mitchell, the deputy chief executive of the Australian Childhood Foundation, said the WWCC process looks for offences, charges, patterns of behaviour and notifiable conduct within a workplace that could endanger children.
But it can only pick up matters that have been recorded. It does not assess risk, can’t forecast how a person will behave, and can’t raise flags about piano teachers or sports coaches or classroom assistants unless there’s some kind of formal record.
“At the end of the day, this is a screening tool. It’s flawed,” Mitchell said. “What the Working With Children Check does is give us a false sense of security.
“It’s an effective screening tool, but it’s not failsafe. We need other measures and strategies in place to strengthen the net of safety.”
Kwang Kyung Yoo playing soccer with a child in 2022.Credit: Facebook
The misleading details on the Lion academy’s website are among the issues being investigated by police, who on Wednesday charged Yoo with three counts of murder at his bedside at Westmead Hospital. The boy cannot be named due to laws protecting child victims of crime.
Police believe Cho and the boy were murdered at the dojang. A friend said Cho had been there for a lesson that afternoon. They say Yoo left after 6.30pm, drove to the couple’s home and confronted Steven Cho, who he stabbed to death.
“We will allege there was murderous intent,” said Doherty.
There may have been an altercation with Cho, as Yoo was left with slash wounds to his chest and arms. He drove himself to Westmead Hospital and told medical staff he had been attacked in a supermarket car park, which triggered a call to police.
Cho’s colleagues – who called him “the machine” due to his work ethic – contacted police when he failed to arrived at work on Tuesday morning. Officers found his body at the entrance to his home and found his wife and the boy two hours later.
A neighbour of the Cho family, named Nancy, told News Corp papers she saw Cho at a local school pick-up on Monday. She’d been on her way to the martial arts studio. She remembers her as a gentle, quiet woman, an unlikely candidate for a love triangle. “She was very … reserved, very shy.”
Mitchell acknowledged the case would leave parents concerned about assessing risk at after-school activities. In the absence of a robust process, she said it fell to parents to ask questions that probed an organisation’s legitimacy.
“Part of what we’ve got to do is empower and support and resource parents in what to look for, to know what questions to ask,” she said.
“Show me your certification, your registration. Show me your qualifications. Show me all the things that say you’re a legitimate business operator in your field. Show me that my kids (are) going to be safe with you.”
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