Hundreds gather to remember Kims

Richard and Teresa Kim were remembered Monday as a couple who lived by the same faith that their pastor said was needed to understand their deaths – allegedly at the hands of their 18-year-old son.

“I have more questions than answers about why something like this happens. I don’t know,” the Rev. Bob Smith of Mt. Spokane Church told about 450 people at the Kims’ memorial service in Cowles Auditorium at Whitworth College.

“We are thrust into the arena of faith.”

That was the most direct reference anyone made to the fact that respiratory specialist Richard Kim, 47, and Rogers High School math teacher Teresa “Terri” Kim, 46, were found dead at their rural Mount Spokane home last Wednesday, and that their son Bryan is in jail on suspicion of two counts of second-degree murder.

The Rev. Keith Hixson counseled against bitterness. Hixson, now a pastor in Ellensburg, was pastor of the Newport Assembly of God Church when the Kims were members. The couple operated an appliance store in Priest River, Idaho, before moving to Spokane and joining Mt. Spokane Church.

Citing the rape and murder of a teenage girl his family had befriended, Hixson said he knows from personal experience that hatred makes people harsh and cynical.

“Practice love; don’t harbor bitterness,” he urged.

Hixson was one of several people who gave examples of Richard and Terri Kim following that practice.

Hixson recalled that, when his son was facing emergency surgery in Seattle, he had a car he called the “puddle jumper” because it was unreliable for long trips. Richard Kim took the puddle jumper and sent Hixson to Seattle in the Kims’ new minivan.

Longtime friend and former co-worker Bruce Hayton said the Kims provided their motor home when he and his family needed to visit his severely ill mother in California.

Tammy McCracken, one of Terri Kim’s colleagues at Rogers, recalled Kim as a teacher who “would never give up on a student.”

When Terri Kim discovered a high school athlete couldn’t afford the proper shoes, she gave the boy’s coach $70 to provide the shoes, McCracken said.

“She did this very quietly,” McCracken said. “Terri lived her faith.”

The Kims’ daughter, Jessica, who is a graduate student at Eastern Washington University, said her mother “was mom to everybody,” Smith said.

McCracken said Terri Kim’s good humor often had her slapping her thigh and laughing before Kim could even finish telling a joke. And Kim “lit up” when her husband e-mailed her a joke.

“They were a beloved husband and wife, and showed me how a marriage should be,” said Richard Kim’s younger sister, Roseanne Kim Testermann.

“The only time I have ever seen Richard really angry was when someone had slighted Terri,” Testermann said. “She was fiercely protective of Richard.”

Testermann recalled that her brother and sister-in-law took Richard Kim’s grandfather into their home while the Kims had a 3-year-old child and a business in which they both worked.

Testermann said the Kims also took her in for a year when she was left alone by the death of her father.

“They actively led me to a Christian life,” she said, noting that Richard began by taking her to Sunday school when he was 13 and she was 4.

Smith said Richard and Terri Kim had faith in a life “on the other side of the valley of the shadow.”

So, he said, “The farewell we are saying is not forever. It is just for a season.”