A woman who lost her son in a crowd crush that happened during Halloween festivities, brings down wreathes from South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol and Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon... Read: 📸 Yonhap via Reuters
The Itaewon district in South Korea’s capital is known to revelers as a place of fun, freedom and openness. But its narrow, steep streets and constrained access points proved a lethal mix for Halloween partygoers who became trapped in a crowd crush that left more than 150 people dead.
The evening had begun with optimism. South Korea was marking Halloween almost free of the COVID-19 restrictions that had dampened recent years’ festivities, and Itaewon was ready to party. The crowd was mostly young; many wore colorful costumes as they converged on the area with friends. There were too many people to move easily, but with the night still young, most seemed relatively sober, said a 29-year-old South Korean graduate student who asked not to be named.
Witnesses who had converged behind the Hamilton Hotel told Reuters they felt a palpable change in the crowd shortly after 10 p.m.“ are going to be crushed to death, everyone’s going crazy,” the unidentified caller says, as the transcript noted screams heard over the phone. It was there, around 10:35 p.m., that she saw the first police officer, standing on something and shouting for the crowd to move away from the hotel.
People landed on or under others in a crush that left a pile of bodies wedged between buildings, some at the bottom appearing unconscious or dead. Some reached out to a small group of emergency workers who had arrived on the scene and spent more than an hour struggling to free them. As calls for help flooded in, by 11:30 p.m. authorities were calling for dozens more ambulances from across the Seoul area.As of Thursday, the death toll stood at 156 with 172 injured. Among the dead, dozens of whom suffered cardiac arrest, were at least six school students, as well as 26 foreign nationals from 14 countries.
“You can’t move your arms. You can’t move your body. If that happens, I am being pushed along by the force of the crowd itself,” he said.“People do things that they don’t do under normal, reasonable circumstances, like booing and screaming,” he said. “And then you have competitive behavior, which refers to a minimum of action to protect yourself in that narrow space.”
Witnesses told Reuters they saw police near the main street directing traffic, but few or none in the alleyways. He started to perform CPR on one young woman, remembering the procedure from TV, he said. When she regained consciousness, he urged her to stay awake and told her: “Don’t close your eyes!”
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