Jang Mi-ran — Jeju Island

Jang Mi-ran, 37, lived in Suwon-ri, a village of about five hundred households in Hallim-eup on the northwest of Jeju Island, South Korea. She went missing in mid-May 2026. Her boyfriend reported it to the Jeju Seobu Police Station on May 15.

According to the indictment and to reporting by Seoul Economic Daily and Chosun Biz, the sergeant assigned to the missing-persons team closed her case about two and a half hours after the report. He told the boyfriend that he had reached her and that she did not want her location disclosed, entered that into the police profiling system, and deleted the case the same day. None of it was true. Police have since said they are reviewing 298 cases the same officer handled, and an internal inquiry has been opened into eight supervisors.

On August 24, day 104, a search of about four hundred people found a badly decomposed body in a palm grove roughly a kilometre from her last known location, a few hundred metres from the village office. It is believed to be hers; DNA confirmation and a final cause-of-death ruling are pending.

Prosecutors indicted the officer in custody on September 18 on charges including dereliction of duty and forging and using official electronic records, covering Jang's case and that of a man in his sixties reported missing on July 2. On September 23 Jang's family filed a 100 million won claim against the state and the sergeant in the Seoul Central District Court, arguing that the government failed its most basic duty to protect a citizen's life.

The case is filed under Enraging. Nobody has been charged in connection with her death itself; the criminal case is about what the police did and did not do after she was reported missing.