Sister, friends testify at Kim trial

When teenager Bryan Kim got angry, he got “images in his head” of him hurting his parents, Kim’s former girlfriend told a jury Wednesday as the state continued its case.

Kim, 19, is accused of two counts of first-degree murder in the Dec. 5, 2006, deaths of his parents, Richard and Terri Kim, who were killed at their Mount Spokane home as they returned home from work.

“Had he ever talked about hurting his parents?” chief deputy criminal prosecutor Jack Driscoll asked 16-year old Marina Ritchey, a Mt. Spokane High School sophomore who said she’d started to date Kim in September 2006.

“Yes,” Ritchey said, describing the violent images that Kim told her flooded into his brain. She said Kim “wasn’t pleased” that his parents had told him he’d have to move out of their home by the end of the year.

Under cross-examination by John Stine, Kim’s public defender, Ritchey said those recurring images “made him sick to his stomach.”

Wednesday’s testimony provided more personal information about Kim, his struggles with bipolar disease, and the tensions between him and his parents from two young women – Ritchey and Kim’s older sister, Jessica Kim.

Ritchey said Kim had told her his parents had taken his cell phone away, but he had it with him when he picked her up to drive her to Mt. Spokane High School on the morning of Dec. 6 – the day after the Kims were killed.

Jessica Kim, 22, provided the most detailed glimpse so far into her parents’ relationship with their troubled son.

She was 19 when she graduated from Whitworth College in 2004 with a mathematics degree. She said she moved out of her parents’ home a year earlier when she was 18 – in large part because of the tensions.

“I didn’t like the dynamic between my parents and my brother. It was a very stressful relationship. There was quite a bit of fighting going on,” she said.

But Kim said she stayed close to her parents, seeing them nearly every weekend as she pursued her master’s degree in math at Eastern Washington University and the Kims built a new home on Mt. Spokane. The last time she saw them was the Saturday night before their deaths.

It was then she learned that her parents had ordered Kim to move out by the end of the year. He wasn’t following their house rules, including taking his medications for bipolar disorder, keeping up his grades and calling home to report his whereabouts.

Her brother was fascinated with Zip ties and slept with a knife under his pillow, Kim said.

The family problems escalated in 2006. The Kims liquidated their son’s college account to buy a trailer where he lived on their property that summer. While Jessica Kim said she’d had a joint bank account with her parents since she was 16, her brother was never included because her parents “didn’t trust him to respect their money.”

When Kim turned 18, his parents started charging him rent and expected him to pay for extras, including the co-pays for his medicines, she said.

Under questioning by Driscoll, Kim said she didn’t authorize the $1,000 transfer her brother made to his account from her parents’ account on the morning of Dec. 6, after they had been killed.

When Kim took his medications for bipolar disorder, he was “much less volatile than he was without them,” she said. He resisted taking them because the pills made him so sleepy that he had to go to bed around 8:30 p.m. to be able to wake up in time for school in the morning, she said.

When Bryan Kim was a young boy, he was the “nicest little kid you’d ever met,” his sister said.

But his bipolar disease was misdiagnosed as Attention Deficit Disorder, and the ADD medications “made him violent,” Kim said.

“We found out later it’s a common issue if someone is bipolar and was given that medication,” she said.

Another high school friend provided additional details about Kim’s relationship with his parents.

Spokane Community College student Jeremy C. Winter said the ultimatum Kim’s parents gave him to move out wasn’t the first.

When Driscoll asked what Kim had told him about being asked to move out a second time, Winter replied, “he was frustrated.”