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Woman says NLV man tortured, assaulted her for 2 days

Updated November 25, 2023 - 5:45 pm

A man is facing felony charges after a woman told authorities that he held her captive for two days, bound her with zip ties, sexually assaulted her, burned her hair and beat her with bolt cutters, leaving her with seven broken bones.

Edward Kim, 42, of North Las Vegas, was arrested Nov. 16 after the Clark County Fire Department called Las Vegas police about finding a woman “covered in wounds on her hands, feet and chest,” the Metropolitan Police Department stated in an arrest report.

After the woman was transported to University Medical Center, a doctor told police that the woman alleged that Kim “assaulted her for the last two days” and “restrained her with zip ties and hit her with bolt cutters,” based on the report.

Kim also “set her hair on fire with a torch lighter” and throughout the beating Kim “would untie her and force” her to have sex and “used his cell phone to record her,” police stated.

Sex crime detectives later spoke to a sexual assault nurse examiner, who said from an examination at UMC, the woman suffered fractures to both her knee caps, her nose, both forearms, her right leg and left ring finger, seven puncture wounds to her legs, two contusions on her torso and singed hair, the report stated.

Officers went to Kim’s apartment where the injuries allegedly took place and found him hiding between two cars in the parking lot, according to the report.

Kim insisted that police accompany him inside his two-bedroom apartment, where Kim said “I don’t know what happened” and when asked what he did when the woman attempted to leave, he “started to ramble,” based on the report.

When a detective asked Kim to explain the quantity of blood seen on his couch, “he stated that ‘we were messing around,’ ” that he “believed the blood came from” the woman’s right foot and stated that he didn’t know what happened.

Kim told police that he is “not really a criminal” and, police stated, “continuously rambled about something happening to his children and refused to answer questions about what happened” to the woman.

He also mentioned that he had at least three security cameras in his apartment and used the other bedroom there “to grow marijuana,” police stated.

With a search warrant, detectives obtained buccal swabs from Kim’s body and recovered digital photos, cameras, bolt cutters and zip ties among other items.

Kim faces charges of domestic battery with a deadly weapon, domestic battery with a deadly weapon and causing substantial bodily harm, first degree kidnapping involving sex, two counts of sexual assault with a deadly weapon and first degree arson, based on jail records.

He is set to appear in North Las Vegas Justice Court for a preliminary hearing on Dec. 5, jail records show.

Contact Jeff Burbank at jburbank@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0382. Follow him @JeffBurbank2 on X.

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