Family mourns Denver’s Seorin Kim as her infant daughter’s death remains unexplained

A baby’s 100th day is a milestone to be celebrated in Korean culture, a sign that the infant is here to stay, to thrive and grow — and this summer, Lesley Younghee Kim was closing in on that mark.

The baby was healthy and happy, and every day her mother, Denver resident Seorin Kim, 44, sent photos of Lesley to her own parents in California with updates on Lesley’s development, her weight, her baby babble.

As the 100-day mark neared, Kim’s parents booked flights to Colorado for the celebration.

But Lesley never made it to 100 days. She and her mother died July 29.

“Eighty-three days living on the Earth,” said Younghee Kim, Seorin’s mother. “Longer than her brother.”

Seorin Kim’s husband of 11 years, Regis University professor Nicholas Myklebust, 45, is charged with first-degree murder in his wife’s death. He has not been charged with killing Lesley, but his attorneys said he could be.

The couple’s first child, Bear Jiyong Myklebust, died in 2021 at the age of nine days. No charges were filed in his death.

Seorin’s parents kept their flights to Colorado this summer. But instead of a 100-day celebration, they arrived for a memorial.

An accountant and musician

Seorin was methodical and close-to-obsessively organized in all aspects of her life with an eye for details that others missed, her family said. Her kitchen cabinet was neatly packed with airtight food storage containers stacked beside and on top of each other, each container hand-labeled with its contents and a date.

And she was a planner. After Seorin died, her family found she’d bought clothes for Lesley up into the two- and three-year sizes.

“She really wanted Lesley to have a long life,” Younghee Kim said. “She felt so terrible that the first baby died in 10 days. She was so much depressed. She really wanted, she had a passion for the second baby, Lesley, to have a long life.”

Both children were carefully planned for and conceived with the help of fertility treatments, Kim’s family said. Seorin worked hard to prepare her body for two pregnancies in her 40s, downing stacks of vitamins, and planning, planning, planning.

Seorin immigrated to the United States from Korea as a 5-year-old in 1985. She loved music, animals and drawing. She kept rabbits as pets and swore off pork when she learned pigs have some level of intelligence. She patiently taught her mother how to use a cellphone and took on a project of digitizing the family’s old photos, a process she never had the chance to finish.

She turned her meticulous organization into a career, earning two bachelor’s degrees, a master’s degree in accounting and a number of professional certifications.

Seorin most recently worked as a forensic accountant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Denver, where she was “highly regarded,” during her eight-year tenure, FBI director Christopher Wray wrote in a letter to her parents after her death.

“She demonstrated the fidelity, bravery and integrity that everyone at the Bureau hopes to achieve,” he wrote.

She enjoyed her work, her parents said, though she had long dreamed of becoming a professional musician. She spent much of her free time playing instruments, singing and composing music, said her father, Uhwan Kim. She posted some of her compositions and performances to YouTube.

“I was amazed at how she developed it,” Uhwan Kim said, adding that when his daughter was younger, he encouraged her to pursue accounting as a career instead of music, concerned she wouldn’t make it as a musician.

“Now I think, you never know, some people become professional (in) later years,” he said. “I changed my mind. You never know, she could (have been) a professional musician.”

The family took Seorin’s instruments with them after she died.

Her father is now learning how to play her violin.

25 years together

A car accident was Younghee Kim’s first thought when the hospital called to say Seorin was dead. It had to be that. She and Uhwan couldn’t imagine their daughter’s husband was capable of violence.

Seorin Kim met Myklebust in college when they were both 19, and they married more than a decade later in 2013. They’d spent 25 years together, and seemed to get along well, her family said.

On July 29, when police responded to the family’s home in the 3200 block of North Syracuse Street, Myklebust claimed Seorin had fallen from a step stool — but she’d suffered obvious blunt-force injuries that didn’t match his claims, police found.

Myklebust had bruises on his hands and scratches on his body. He’s also charged with tampering with evidence; police believe he tried to clean up the crime scene before officers arrived.

Lesley suffered no obvious external injuries; a ruling on her cause and manner of death is still pending and Myklebust hasn’t been charged with her death or his son’s.

He is represented by attorneys from the Colorado Office of the State Public Defender, which as a policy does not comment on open cases.

In 2021, Bear’s cause and manner of death were ruled to be undetermined, though the infant suffered skull fractures. A Denver police spokesman said Thursday that police have not reopened the investigation into Bear’s death.

Seorin’s parents wonder whether Myklebust became jealous after each child’s birth, if he couldn’t handle the lifestyle change from married to married with kids. Myklebust had complained that Bear was “too fussy,” Uhwan Kim said.

“We couldn’t imagine he could turn (out to have) that kind of character,” he said.

They can’t make sense of it, or label it, or put it neatly in a box. They have no answers.

When Seorin’s family walked through the couple’s apartment after the crime scene was cleared, they found investigators had searched almost everywhere, overturned things, left them ajar and out of place.

The home was a mess, and Seorin would have been mortified to see it that way.

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