LETTER FROM THE FAMILY OF ALBERT HYUN-JIN PARK TO THE COURT¶
Filed in support of the Petition for Resentencing of Victor Amaya, Case No. C-24-CR-06-018547, through counsel
November 7, 2030
The Honorable Maxine R. Holcomb Associate Judge Circuit Court for Baltimore City 100 N. Calvert Street Baltimore, Maryland 21202
Re: State of Maryland v. Victor Amaya, Case No. C-24-CR-06-018547
Your Honor:
We are the family of Albert Hyun-Jin Park—his eldest daughter, Grace; his younger daughter, Karen; his mother, Mrs. Young-Hee Choi; and his two older sisters, Sun-Mi Park and Eun-Joo Park-Williams. Our father, son, and brother was killed on the afternoon of June 11, 2006, behind the register of the liquor store he had owned and operated on the 1900 block of Pennsylvania Avenue in Baltimore for nineteen years. He was forty-one years old. He was a father of two, the youngest of three children, the only son of his mother, and the younger brother of his two sisters. He had immigrated to the United States with our grandmother and aunts in 1981, when he was sixteen, after his own father’s death in Daegu. He finished high school in Baltimore, worked for several years at the market his cousin operated on the same Avenue, and opened his own store in 1989. He worked there six days a week, twelve hours a day, for the rest of his life.
We write to the Court in support of the Petition for Resentencing filed by Mr. Victor Amaya through the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland and the Office of the Public Defender. We have read the Petition and the supporting declarations. We agree with the facts the Petition recites. We agreed with them in 2007, at Mr. Amaya’s original sentencing, when we submitted victim impact statements opposing his prosecution and any sentence of imprisonment upon him. Our position has not changed in the twenty-four years that have passed since.
We want the Court to understand what we understood at the time and what we understand still. Mr. Amaya did not kill our father. Mr. Amaya did not enter the store on June 11, 2006. Mr. Amaya was sitting in the back seat of a car parked outside, with his earphones in and his music on, when our father was killed at the register he had stood behind for nineteen years. When the officers arrived at the car, Mr. Amaya was pulled from it crying, and was, by every account that has ever been given of that moment, calling out for his mother. He was twenty years old. He had been gravely injured in an assault four years earlier and had never recovered. He was not, in any sense that the word ought to bear, a participant in what happened to our father.
When Mr. Amaya’s co-defendants stood at allocution at his 2007 sentencing and told Judge Marston, against their own apparent interest, that Mr. Amaya had played no role in what they had done, we believed them. We believed them because we had watched the news footage of the arrest, because we had read the police reports, because we had attended every day of the trial, because we had seen Mr. Amaya in the courtroom and we had seen what he was. We submitted victim impact statements asking the court not to imprison him. We were told, gently and by people doing their jobs, that this was not the kind of case in which the family’s position would determine the outcome. The court imposed life with the possibility of parole, and Mr. Amaya was committed to the Patuxent Institution Eligible Persons Program. He has been there ever since.
In the twenty-four years that have passed, we have continued to hold the position we held at the time. Each year on the anniversary of our father’s death, we have remembered him at our home and at our church, and we have remembered Mr. Amaya as well, who lost his life in a different way for the same reason. We have followed his case where we have been able to. We learned, when the Maryland Felony Murder Resentencing Act was enacted last year, that it had been written for cases like his. We are grateful that it has now been invoked on his behalf, and we are writing to ask the Court to grant the Petition.
We do not write this lightly. Our father’s death has been the central wound of our family for twenty-four years. We have not forgotten him; we will not forget him; the man who shot him is serving the sentence he should serve. But we have also known, every one of those years, that the imprisonment of Mr. Amaya does not honor our father, does not return him to us, and does not redress the wrong that was done. It is a separate wrong, done in his name, that he would not have wanted done.
Our father was a man who knew the kids in the neighborhood by name. He kept the snacks our regulars loved in stock—he made sure he always had backup cases of Nacho Cheese Doritos in the back stockroom, because the boys from the blocks around the store would have bought them out within an hour of opening if he hadn’t. He let people run a tab when they were short. He understood, better than most people who knew him understood, the difference between someone who has done something and someone who has been done to. If he had walked back out from behind the register on the afternoon of June 11, 2006, and seen Mr. Amaya pulled out of that car in tears, he would have wanted, more than anything in the world, to put down whatever he was carrying and walk over to him. He would not have wanted what has been done in his name to that young man across the years since.
We respectfully ask the Court to grant the Petition. We ask that Mr. Amaya be released from his confinement at the Patuxent Institution and allowed to return to the home of his mother, Ms. Gladys Amaya, who has visited him every week for twenty-four years. We ask that this case be brought, after a quarter-century, to the only ending that has ever made sense to us.
Grace has asked to be heard in person at the resentencing hearing, and she will speak then to what is harder to put in writing. We will all be present.
Our father’s memory deserves better than what has been done in his name. So does Mr. Amaya. We respectfully ask the Court to honor both at once.
With respect, and with the gratitude that has been a long time arriving,
_______________________________________ GRACE MIN-HEE PARK Eldest daughter of Albert Hyun-Jin Park Baltimore, Maryland
_______________________________________ KAREN SOO-JIN PARK Daughter of Albert Hyun-Jin Park
_______________________________________ MRS. YOUNG-HEE CHOI Mother of Albert Hyun-Jin Park
_______________________________________ SUN-MI PARK Sister of Albert Hyun-Jin Park
_______________________________________ EUN-JOO PARK-WILLIAMS Sister of Albert Hyun-Jin Park
cc: American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland Office of the Public Defender, Post-Conviction and Sentence Modification Division Office of the State’s Attorney for Baltimore City