Virtual madness kills

Virtual madness kills
Korean baby dies as parents Kim Yoo-chul and Choi Mi-sun raise virtual bub | Herald Sun

• 12 hours a day at internet cafes
• Baby, 3 months, left home alone
• Parents neglected real lives

A COUPLE addicted to computer games let their real baby starve to death while raising a virtual daughter online.

Police said the couple spent up to12 hours a day at internet cafes, leaving their three-month-old daughter home alone at their apartment in Suwon, South Korea.

Police said the couple became obsessed with living online and neglected their real lives, The Sun reports.

They raised an avatar baby through their profiles on a Second Life-style game called PRIUS, while their real daughter was given just one bottle of milk a day.

Father Kim Yoo-chul, 41, and mom Choi Mi-sun, 25, called the emergency services when they returned from one online session in September last year and found their daughter dead.

"We found she had passed away when we woke up in the morning," they said.

But cops became suspicious about how severely dehydrated the baby was.

A spokesman for the National Scientific Criminal and Investigation Laboratory, which carried out an autopsy on the girl, said, "she appears to have starved to death because she was not fed for such a long period of time."

read more:article by Rhodri Philips  heraldsun.com.au

Posted via web from xea's posterous