On a Tuesday morning in June 2023, Korean American restaurant owner Eina Kwon was doing something unbearably ordinary: sitting in traffic with her husband, Sung Kwon, on the way to open their Japanese eatery, Aburiya Bento House, in Seattle’s Belltown neighborhood.
Minutes later, she lay mortally wounded, 32 weeks pregnant, after a stranger ran up to their white Tesla at a red light and fired every bullet he had into the car. Their unborn baby girl died shortly after.
This weekend, the man charged in that 2023 shooting — 33‑year‑old Cordell Goosby, a convicted felon from Chicago — was found not guilty by reason of insanity. He had been charged with first-degree murder and first-degree attempted murder in the death of 34‑year‑old Eina and the shooting of Sung, who survived but was also injured.
For many in Seattle’s Korean and broader Asian diaspora communities, the verdict has reopened a wound that never fully closed: grief for a mother and child stolen, and anger at a system that feels unable to keep them safe.
Prosecutors say Kwon and her husband were stopped at an intersection around 11:15 a.m. when Goosby allegedly sprinted toward the driver’s side window with a gun raised.
“In a short span of time, he fired a gun in the victim’s car window, striking the victims inside the car. After firing all the bullets he had in the gun into the victims’ car, he turned and ran from the scene,” prosecutors wrote in court papers, adding, “The defendant’s actions left a family and community shattered.” Officers later found Goosby; court documents say he put his hands in the air and said, “I did it! I did it!”
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News spread quickly through Belltown, and then through Korean and Asian American circles across the US and online. Within days, hundreds gathered at the intersection of 4th Avenue and Lenora and in front of Aburiya Bento House, leaving flowers and handwritten notes and marching under a banner that read “UNITE FOR SAFETY.”
On Reddit’s Korean and Seattle forums, community members called her killing “unacceptable,” a chilling reminder of how vulnerable they feel in public space.
Then‑Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell called the broad‑daylight shooting an “unimaginable tragedy.” Many Asian residents heard those words in the context of a longer, pandemic‑era timeline — one that includes a spike in anti‑Asian harassment, violence against elders, and viral footage of Asian women attacked in seemingly random public encounters.
NEW: Man who randomly shot and killed a woman and her unborn child, found not guilty because he was “insane at the time of the shooting.”
Cordell Goosby admitted to killing Eina Kwon who was 8 months pregnant.
There was reportedly zero interaction between Goosby, who used a… pic.twitter.com/Bu4BiorQNr
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) March 21, 2026
Even when a case like this is not charged as a hate crime, it lands in a landscape where Asian bodies in public have too often been treated as expendable.
Experts for both the defense and prosecution evaluated Goosby and determined he was legally insane at the time of the shooting, leading the court to permit the plea. His future release, local outlets note, would depend on approval from multiple state and court entities, and he could spend the rest of his life under psychiatric confinement.
Legally, that distinction matters. Emotionally, for many in the Korean diaspora, it does not feel like enough. Goosby was prohibited from owning a firearm because of his criminal record in Illinois, yet still allegedly used a stolen gun to carry out the shooting.
Community members see a through‑line: a country that is willing to warehouse mentally ill people of color in jails and hospitals, but not willing to intervene before they can access weapons; a legal framework that can recognize insanity after the fact but not prevent the conditions that made this act possible.
“These cases are tragic all around,” said Gabrielle Charlton, who leads the felony competency and forensic mental health unit in the King County prosecuting attorney’s office. “Obviously, they involve a horrific incident and they also involve someone who was severely mentally ill at the time of that incident.”
Her words echo the tension many Asian American observers feel: the desire to honor the reality of severe mental illness, and the fear that “insanity” can become yet another way the system explains away the killing of a woman of color minding her own business.
A year after the shooting, community members still gathered outside Aburiya Bento House to remember Kwon, lighting candles and calling her “selfless” and “the most loving person.”
In Belltown, people still point out the corner where she died, and younger Asian Americans talk about how they now scan sidewalks, crosswalks, and cars more carefully — hyper‑aware that “random” violence rarely feels random when you live inside a body that has already been marked.
In theory, a not‑guilty‑by‑reason‑of‑insanity verdict says that a person was too ill to understand what they were doing, and that long‑term treatment and supervision — not prison — is the most just response. For Eina and her daughter, there is no second chance. For a Korean American community already stretched thin by grief and fear, the question now is not only who gets held, and where, but whose safety truly counts when we say “never again.”
