A memorial for the victims of the crowd surge in the Itaewon district of Seoul, the South Korean capital. Photo / Chang W. Lee, The New York Times
There were few police officers around as a mass of revelers swelled. From within the crowd came calls to “push, push” and a big shove, according to witnesses. Then, they began to fall.
It was supposed to be a festive evening, throngs of raucous youngsters dressed as zombies, princesses and super heroes converging on one of Seoul’s most popular nightlife districts for their first restriction-free Halloween celebration since the pandemic began.
Late Saturday evening, they crowded into bars and nightclubs pumping out the latest K-pop hits and spilled out into the tight alleys that wind through the city’s Itaewon neighbourhood. They snacked on the Greek, Turkish, Italian and other international foods for which the diverse district is known.
As the night grew more frenetic and the mass of revellers swelled, many of them crammed into an alleyway barely 3.5 metres wide, in a bottleneck of human traffic that made it difficult to breathe and move. There were few police officers around, and from within the crowd came calls to “push, push” and a big shove, according to witnesses. Then, they began to fall, a tangle of too many bodies, compressed into too small of a space.
Zen Ogren, 32, found herself stuck in a packed and sweltering club alongside the narrow alleyway, a thoroughfare connecting a strip of bars to a busy subway station and a popular spot for taking photographs. Outside the club’s door, people were yelling, “Please don’t come out, people are dying,” she said. Security guards urged the crowds to not jostle, but many pushed forward, stepping on top of those who had fallen.
“They just wanted to go out,” Ogren said.
In the end, more than 150 people, most of them in their 20s and 30s, died, crushed under the surge of the crowd.
The tragedy — one of South Korea’s worst peacetime disasters — and questions about the authorities’ responsibility to manage the crowd, has marred the image of South Korea, a thriving technology and pop-culture powerhouse that is chronically prone to man-made disasters. It has also added to political woes of the country’s beleaguered president, Yoon Suk Yeol, already suffering low approval ratings with a growing number of people out on the street demanding his resignation.
As the sun set on Itaewon on Sunday evening, a mournful and subdued atmosphere suffused the neighbourhood. Police closed the streets to traffic in the area, where shuttered bars and restaurants put up signs of condolences. On the sidewalks, impromptu memorials of flowers and liquor formed makeshift shrines to the victims.
Bereaved families searched hospital morgues looking for their children, while the Seoul government received thousands of calls about missing persons. Choi Seon-mi waited hours at a local community centre for word of her daughter, Park Ga-young, who had made a trip to Seoul.
She fell off her chair when she was told of her daughter’s death, left to tell the news to her extended family in the waiting room.
“It felt like the sky was falling,” she said. “What to do about my child? What to do about my child?”
Choi’s last conversation with her daughter, she said, was about Park’s preparations to study fashion in Canada. She had been working part time to pay for it.
Park was to turn 20 on Tuesday.
In briefing after briefing Sunday, officials, including the president and the Seoul mayor, Oh Se-hoon, vowed to do everything they could to make South Korea safer. But they offered little explanation for the lack of crowd control, what went wrong in the Itaewon alley and why the country has had recurring disasters.
In 2014, 16 people at an outdoor concert were killed when the ventilation grate they were standing on caved in. That same year, a ferry sank, killing more than 300 people, most of them high school students on a school trip.
“Our society has advanced greatly in accumulating wealth and building the economy, but we are far behind in respecting human lives,” said Choi Chang-woo, the leader of the Citizens’ Alliance for a Safe Society, a civic group.
In the past five years working at a kebab shop in Itaewon, Ulas Cetinkaya, 36, from Turkey, had never seen crowds like the one Saturday night. He figured there would be a lot of people because it was one of the first celebrations since Covid-19 restrictions were lifted, but he was surprised at the minimal police presence.
“I don’t know how the police weren’t expecting it,” he said. “I blame the authorities for this.”
In South Korea, police are usually so good at crowd control that the country’s protest rallies often look like choreographed events. Tens of thousands of people march down roads chanting protest slogans and even picking up trash behind themselves. Police officers clad in bright yellow-green jackets walk alongside, guiding the protesters and carefully diverting traffic.
While Halloween is not traditionally celebrated in South Korea, it has become increasingly popular over the past decade, as Seoul has grown more cosmopolitan. Before the pandemic, dense crowds of costumed revellers packed the streets of Itaewon, a neighbourhood closely associated with the city’s foreigners and American culture because of its proximity to an old US military base.
Still, officials in Seoul said they were caught off guard by the unorganised and spontaneous crowds Saturday night. Unlike political and labour rallies, which by law must be reported to authorities in advance, the young people who descend on Itaewon every Halloween gather freely in large numbers, without the restrictions or permits required when hosting large, organised events.
On Sunday, the home minister, Lee Sang-min, admitted that police were underprepared, partly because their forces had been diverted earlier Saturday to nearby districts where anti-government protests were being held.
“The crowd this year was not worrisomely bigger, compared with past years,” Lee told reporters. “But our police forces were scattered to various protests across the city.”
The situation, a large crowd without a large police presence, proved deadly.
Seon Yeo-jeong, a popular South Korean YouTuber who recounted her experience on her Instagram page, remembered hearing people yell, “Hey, push! We’re stronger! I’ll win!” From there, she said, “Things suddenly went from order to chaos.”
Seo Kun, 27, a student from China, was in the crush of the crowd near the front. Around her, she said, people shouted, “I’m dying.” The woman next to her went silent and stopped breathing.
Seo planned to stay in South Korea after completing graduate school, but she has changed her mind. “I want to go home,” she said. “I want to stay with my parents.”
The deadly crowd surge was first reported to the government’s emergency-response centre at 10:15pm. The government’s nearest fire department and first-response centre was only about 200 metres from the alley, but it was hard for officers to reach the victims.
Janelle Story, 35, an American English teacher who was out with two friends in Itaewon, saw “this sea of bodies come rushing toward us really fast” at 10:34pm around a corner from the alleyway. “It seemed to happen so suddenly,” Story said. Someone cried out, “There’s a girl down there,” but most in the crowd did not appear to take it seriously, she said.
There was almost no crowd control, said Nuhyin Ahmed, 32, a tech worker from India who along with several friends tried to join Halloween revellers in the alley, a popular place for people to take photographs in their costumes to post on social media. Last year, though crowds were lighter, he said, several police officers were monitoring and controlling the entrance to the alley, and they shut it down around midnight.
“If those police had been there this year,” he said, “maybe no one would have died.”
When Lee Joo-young, a witness, got to Itaewon with her friends around 11pm, they saw ambulances and fire trucks arriving, but the clubs still “had their music blasting.” Lee said there were not enough police officers or firefighters. Partygoers started to help with crowd control, dragging the unconscious out of the alleyway.
“The worst part was as people were giving CPR and dying, the clubs were still going, and they ran until 4am,” Ahmed said.
Soh Won, 18, a high school student, said he saw some partygoers still drinking and singing next to the bodies on the street.
“I lost my faith in humanity,” he said.
On Sunday, the blocked alleyways of Itaewon contained the detritus from the party and disaster of the night before: strewn paper, plastic bags, beer cans and water bottles.
As makeshift memorials filled the sidewalks, mourners cried openly. Ellen Olsson, a Swede who left flowers by the alley, said the tragedy had shaken many in the neighbourhood.
“This place is filled with police and chaos, so it’s good to let people know we care,” she said.
Next to the alley, someone posted a handwritten message that read, “Condolences, please go to a better world and realise your unfulfilled dreams.” Beneath it were flowers and a bottle of soju, a popular Korean alcohol, with a stack of small paper cups.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Choe Sang-Hun, John Yoon, Paul Mozur, Victoria Kim, Lee Su-Hyun and Jin Yu Young
Photographs by: Chang W. Lee
©2022 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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