In addition, they expressed the fact that 'so few willing to speak up for Hae' and that they thought the podcast had misled its audience. When Syed was given a second chance at trial in 2016, his family reportedly informed reporters that the podcast had 'reopened wounds few can understand.' This is according to the Baltimore Sun. The Lee family refused to take part in Serial and has insisted that Syed was fairly tried and that justice was served during the initial trial.

She was an athlete who participated in field hockey and lacrosse. Lee attended the magnet programme at Woodlawn High School near Baltimore, Maryland. She was born in South Korea in 1980 and moved there with her mother Youn Kim and brother Young Lee. In 1992, Hae Min Lee moved to the United States to live with her grandparents.

That ruling was upheld by the Maryland Court of Special Appeals in 2018, but it was overturned by the Maryland Court of Appeals in 2019. After reversing Syed's conviction in 2016, Judge Martin P. In 2014, the podcast Serial reported the slaying, reviving interest in the case.

Lee's ex-boyfriend Adnan Masud Syed was initially convicted guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison plus 30 years. Four weeks later, her body was discovered in Leakin Park and she died from manual strangulation. On February 9, a passerby in Baltimore's Leakin Park found Lee's partially buried body.Ī high school student of Korean descent named Hae Min Lee was last seen in Baltimore County, Maryland, on January 13, 1999. But an odd source, a podcast, gave his case a huge boost. Throughout his nearly 25 years in prison, Syed maintained his innocence. Did Adnan Syed Kill Hae Min Lee?įollowing the discovery of new DNA evidence in the case, Adnan Syed was cleared of all charges related to the 1999 murder of his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee.Īccording to the Baltimore state's attorney's office, a year-long inquiry proved Syed had been wrongly convicted of killing Lee by strangulation and that recent DNA tests had disproven this claim. The discussion around Syed's case would eventually aid him in winning a fresh trial within a few months. The 'kids' she interviewed at the time were actually adults, and some of their tales had changed.įorensics experts and armchair detectives sprung into action as each episode disclosed fresh information, and perhaps new suspects, and debated their hypotheses on social media. Koenig saying, 'For the last year I've spent every working day trying to figure out where a high school kid was for an hour after school one day in 1999.' The central question of Serial is Who Killed Hae Min Lee? The first episode features Ms.

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