1. Introduction: A Call That Should Never Have Been Repeated
There are moments in daily life that shake us out of our routines—single, terrible moments that we can barely process. But what happens when a moment of fear and dread repeats itself dozens of times until it loses meaning? A recent report from Chosun Ilbo, under the exclusive headline “40-Year-Old Arrested for 37 False Reports of ‘Killing Son,'” offers a haunting look into one such case. The story appears straightforward at first: a man in his forties repeatedly contacted emergency services and confessed to killing his own son, time after time, until police had no choice but to intervene and arrest him. The number alone—37 times—is staggering. It is not a slip, not a prank, not a momentary lapse of judgment. It is a pattern, repeated with enough frequency to overwhelm local emergency response teams and to leave a trail of confusion, fear, and eventually exhaustion. But behind the bare facts lies a deeper, more troubling human story. Who was this man? What drove him to construct the same confession again and again? And what happened to the son he claimed to have killed? The report gives us only the framework of a strange and sad event, but the human weight of those 37 calls is enormous. Each call would have begun with adrenaline: dispatchers hearing the words “I killed my son,” sending patrols with sirens to the house, officers preparing for the worst possible scene. Each call ended with nothing—no body, no blood, no victim, but also no resolve. The silence after each false alarm might have been the loudest part. The man was eventually arrested, but his case raises questions that cannot be answered by handcuffs alone. What kind of pain makes a person lie so urgently, so specifically, so crudely? This article will try to summarize and humanize the reported incident, not to justify the behavior, but to understand it—because understanding may be the only way to prevent the next 37 calls.
2. The Repetition: 37 False Confessions and the Weight of Each Alarm
Let us imagine what those 37 false reports looked like from the outside. The first time the 40-year-old called, he likely got the full response: police officers arriving within minutes, their hands tense, their voices sharp, ready to confront a brutal scene. They found a house perhaps ordinary, perhaps quiet, with a son alive and confused. Maybe the man was calm by the time they arrived; maybe he was distraught; maybe he insisted that he had done something terrible. The officers would have checked the home, spoken to the son, and concluded that no crime had occurred. They may have filed a report, advised the man, and left. But then it happened again. And again. At some point, the police must have recognized the caller, the address, the same apocalyptic words. The second time, there was still adrenaline. The fifth time, perhaps frustration. The tenth time, maybe a grim routine. By the twentieth call, officers might have categorized it as a nuisance, but they still had to respond—because what if one day the confession was true? That is the cruel paradox of the false alarm. You cannot ignore a person who claims to have killed his child, because the risk of being wrong is too great. So the entire machinery of emergency response was activated 37 times, each time racing toward a scene that did not exist, each time forced to confront the possibility of murder, each time leaving without a body but with an increasing sense of unease. The son in this story, too, must have lived through a bizarre and painful cycle. To have your own parent say, over and over, that he killed you—what does that do to a person? It is a strange inversion of family trust. The son likely had to stand there, alive, and tell officers: “He didn’t kill me. I‘m here. I don’t know why he says this.” Perhaps at first he was worried for his father. Later, he may have felt embarrassed, angry, or just exhausted. The relationship between father and son must have suffered in ways we can hardly imagine. Yet the man kept calling. And the police kept answering. This section of the story is about the burden of repetition—how an act can become a habit even when it is destroying the person doing it, and how the emergency system is held hostage by one person’s crisis.
3. Peeling Back the Surface: The Man Behind the Calls
To humanize this story, we must ask the uncomfortable question: why? What would make a middle-aged man call authorities 37 times to confess to a murder he never committed? The headline treats these calls as false reports—and legally, that is exactly what they were. But psychologically, they may have been something entirely different. They could have been a distorted cry for help. People who suffer from severe mental illness sometimes reach for extreme narratives because ordinary requests do not feel urgent enough to be heard. “I am in pain” might not bring someone running, but “I killed my son” will. The man may have been suffering from paranoia, delusions, or a major depressive episode that convinced him he was dangerous to those he loved. In the haze of his mind, he might not have been lying at all. He might have genuinely believed that he had committed the worst possible act, even when his son stood before him alive. There is a tragic gap between his internal reality and the physical reality of the room. The police saw no crime; they may not have seen that this man was drowning in his own thoughts. Alternatively, the calls might have been a form of self-punishment. By repeatedly locking himself into a confession, he could have been trying to force authority to punish him, to put him away, to stop him from whatever he feared he might do. He may have felt that he did not deserve to live as a normal father, that he was a threat, that his son would be safer if he were in jail. That kind of self-loathing is painful to contemplate. It is also possible that alcohol or substance abuse played a role, distorting his judgment and feeding the same delusional phrase into his mouth each time. Whatever the cause, the man was not simply a malicious liar. He was, in all likelihood, a deeply suffering individual. We do not know his name, his medical history, or his family’s private struggles. But we can recognize that no healthy person repeats a confession of murder 37 times. There is something profoundly broken in his mental and emotional state—and that brokenness deserves compassion, even as his actions deserve consequences. He may have been searching for rescue, but did not know how to ask for it, so he used the most shocking words he could find. And because no one understood that, the rescue never came. Instead, the calls continued until the only response left was arrest.
4. The Social Costs: When False Reports Endanger Real Lives
It is tempting to see this story purely through the lens of one troubled man, but there is a much broader impact. Every false report drains resources that could save a real life. Consider what happens every time the police dispatch a patrol car to the man‘s house. That car is absent from the streets; those officers are unavailable to answer another call. In a busy city, where emergency services are stretched thin, minutes can be the difference between life and death. The big lie, called in 37 times, did not exist in a vacuum. Somewhere, at the same time, a genuine car accident and a real cardiac arrest might have been waiting for help. Another grieving family might have called about a loved one who actually went missing. And the dispatcher, already tired from the repeated false alarms, had to decide where to send limited resources. This is known as the “crying wolf” problem. Alarms are designed to work when they are rare; when they are common, we become desensitized. The man’s 37 calls threatened not only his own credibility but also the safety of everyone who relies on emergency response. There is also a silent cost to the police officers and emergency workers. Each time they arrived at the man’s home, they opened the door prepared to see a child‘s body. That kind of preparation takes a psychic toll. Even after realizing the scene was not a crime, the emotional spike does not simply vanish. It lingers in the stomach, in the shoulders, in the memory. For officers who have handled real homicides, false calls mock their trauma. For rookie officers, the first response could be a terrifying experience that leaves them questioning their instincts. And for the wider community, news of this arrest may stir fear and confusion: a man claiming to have killed his son, again and again, in the same neighborhood. The false reports eroded trust in the peacefulness of the home. Neighbors may have heard sirens and wondered: could it be true this time? The emotional residue of 37 police visits is not easily washed away. So while we sympathize with the man’s probable mental illness, we must also acknowledge that his behavior was not harmless. It was a repeated act of violence against public trust, no matter how unintentional. The law was right to stop it. But the law alone cannot repair the damage already done to the nearby community, to the emergency workers, and to the son who had to watch his father be led away.
5. The Arrest: Legal Consequences and a Cry for Justice and Healing
The arrest of the 40-year-old marks the end of the 37 false reports, but in some ways, it is only the beginning of a more complicated chapter. In South Korea, making false reports to emergency services can lead to criminal charges, and in this case, the sheer volume of calls almost certainly made an arrest inevitable. The authorities did not arrest the man simply to punish him; they did it to stop the cycle. Each call had to be answered, and the police could no longer risk leaving the man free to repeat the same emergency. The legal system now faces a difficult task. On one hand, this is a clear case of repeatedly wasting public resources and causing unnecessary alarm. The punishment should reflect the seriousness of that offense. On the other hand, the justice system must consider the man’s condition. If he was mentally ill at the time of the calls, he may need treatment more than prison. If he was suffering from alcoholism or a personality disorder, he may need rehabilitation and therapy. A wise court would see that incarceration alone, without psychiatric help, would only make him more broken. He would leave prison worse, and the risk of future calls would remain. The son also deserves a voice in this process. He is the hidden victim of this case—not murdered, but repeatedly denied a normal bond with his father. He may love his father and fear for him at the same time. The court could order family counseling, which might begin to repair what has been torn. The arrest gives society a chance to intervene, not just to punish. It is also a signal to the wider community: this kind of behavior will not be tolerated, because public safety matters. Yet justice should be served with insight. When an act is repeated 37 times, it is not an accident; it is a pattern rooted in deep personal disorder. The best response is a combination of accountability and compassion—holding the man responsible for his choices while providing the treatment that he clearly lacks. Only then can the number 37 stop growing. Only then can the son finally sit in a quiet room, without sirens, knowing that his father can no longer make such terrible claims, and hoping that somewhere in prison or hospital, a real healing can begin.
6. Reflection: What We Can Learn from a Strange and Sad Story
The story of the 40-year-old and his 37 false reports is not one that will make a long documentary, but it carries a lesson that is worth considering. Every one of us is more than the worst thing we have done. The man who told the police he had killed his son was, in all likelihood, a person overwhelmed by something he could not name. His repeated confession was perhaps the only way he knew to express his own horror at himself. The system that arrested him was right to stop the calls, but the system also failed him earlier. At some point, after the second or third false report, someone should have realized that this was not a prank, but a medical emergency. A simple deterrent would not work. What he needed was a psychiatric evaluation, a therapist, a family intervention. The son needed to be protected from the stress of the situation, but also helped to understand his father’s illness. The neighbors needed to be reassured. And the police needed to be supported, because responding to 37 false calls is an exhausting duty that no officer should face. Humanizing this story does not mean treating the man as a hero or excusing his actions. It means seeing him as a human being. Our society tends to judge quickly when we read alarming headlines, and that is understandable. But the first step toward preventing such cases is to look at them with humility. Why are our mental health services not accessible enough for a troubled person to ask for help at the first sign of crisis? Why is there so much shame attached to saying, “I am angry at my son,” or “I am afraid of myself”? If it were easier to speak honestly, maybe no one would have to invent a murder to receive attention. The 37 calls were not a random event. They were a symptom. As we close this reflection, we should remember the son, who was never hurt, but who was forced to hear that his life had been erased 37 times; the police, who raced to find a body that never appeared; and the man himself, who sat in a cell, perhaps still confused, perhaps finally calm because someone has stopped him. There is no neat ending here. There is only an invitation to be more caring, more alert, more willing to see the pain beneath the troubling behavior. If we can do that, then perhaps the next time someone cries for help in a strange and twisted way, we will answer with understanding before the sirens ever need to blare.