A recently released email exchange between USC Professor Raja Fayad and his ex-wife Sunghee Kwon — who murdered him in the USC's Public Health Research Center this February — show that Fayad had apparently relinquished his share of their jointly-owned Columbia house to Kwon two weeks before the shooting.
In an email dated January 19, Kwon pleaded with Fayad to sign the deed over to her: "I want to sell this house to live. Please let your name out of Deed (sic) and let me list and sell this house ASAP, I need some money."
The two had divorced several years before, but lived together in the same house until two weeks prior to the shooting. In a police report conducted the January before the murder, Fayad said that the two had broken up and that he lived elsewhere.
Released by the university and pulled from Fayad's USC-sponsored email account, the exchange shows Kwon's repeated attempts to contact Fayad in order to convince him to cede his stake in the house.
Three days after the January 19 exchange, Fayad's account received another email: "Thank you so much for the taking off (sic) your name from the Deed. I will list on this weekend (sic). Thank you for consider (sic) me and my tomorrow."
On February 2 — three days before the shooting — Kwon sent an email to Fayad suggesting that she created a will, of which he was the sole beneficiary: "As we promised each other, I won't leave you, so I put every house on my name, but the Columbia house we shared, but last week you gave it to me," she wrote. "And I made a last will to give every thing (sic) to you. You now are angry about it, because you want to leave me."
Few of Fayad's responses to this exchange are listed in the release, except a missive to Kwon to stop messaging his USC account.
See also:
'He made us all better people': Remembering Raja Fayad