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17-Year-Old Girl Gets Off Bus and is Never Seen Again

Liz Jin
4 min readJan 2, 2025

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A Desperate Father Searches for His Missing Daughter for 25 Years

Hye-hee Song went missing in 1999. Her parents plastered thousands of fliers with her photo all over South Korea; image source.

When your child disappears (and is presumed dead), is it worse to know exactly how they were killed or never to learn their fate? The first option provides closure, but the second option offers the tenuous hope that maybe, just maybe, they are still out there waiting to be rescued.

Mercifully, most people will never have to answer this question — the most agonizing kind of “Sophie’s choice.”

But for one father, the question of what happened to his precious daughter haunted him for a quarter century.

A strange man follows Hye-hee off a bus.

On February 13, 1999, Hye-hee Song, a sophomore in high school, boarded a bus for home after a fun-filled day with her friends and boyfriend.

The short ride to her village only took 15 minutes. Home was a humble farm outside the city of Pyeongtaek in South Korea.

But when Hye-hee arrived at her stop, she wasn’t the only passenger getting off.

The bus driver recalled that a man in his 30s, who reeked of alcohol, followed the teenage girl off the bus.

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Liz Jin
Liz Jin

Written by Liz Jin

“I wake up in the morning with a desire to both save the world and savor the world. That makes it hard to plan my day.”

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