Two American Students Among Dead in South Korea Halloween Stampede

Two American college students and 24 other foreigners were among the 153 confirmed deaths in a crowd surge at a Halloween festival in Seoul, South Korea on Saturday night.

South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol declared a national week of mourning on Sunday as Korean “K-pop” acts canceled concerts and promotional events.

The stampede occurred around 10:20 p.m. local time in Itaewon, a nightlife district in Seoul. Over 100,000 young revelers were packed into the narrow, winding streets of the district for Halloween parties on Saturday night, overwhelming local police.

The Associated Press noted that Itaewon, located near the onetime headquarters of U.S. forces deployed to South Korea, is highly popular with both Korean young people and foreign visitors. Halloween is not a big holiday for children or trick-or-treaters in South Korea, but teens and twentysomethings have embraced it as an opportunity for costume parties.

The Korea Times quoted South Korean cultural officials who said Itaewon became so popular because it is a “melting pot” where local youth can meet interesting foreign visitors, and Halloween is a popular new custom spread by those visitors, eagerly embraced for its colorful decorations, wild costumes, and macabre humor.

Police officials are not yet certain exactly what prompted the stampede, but for some reason people began pushing and surging in several different directions, creating a deadly domino effect in a particularly narrow back alley near the Hamilton Hotel. Hundreds were shoved into a ten-foot-wide passage, with lethal results.

Horrifying footage on social media showed youngsters in the narrow alley not so much trampled underfoot as slowly squeezed to death as the crowd pressure increased. A few desperate people climbed the walls of buildings to get above the increasing human pressure in the alley. The first calls received by emergency services were for victims of suffocation. Rescue personnel struggled to get through the densely packed crowd to reach those in distress. Local hospitals were quickly overwhelmed by the tidal wave of deaths and injuries, as they were already busy with the usual weekend surge of patients.

“Of the 154 who died, 98 were women and 56 were men. There is speculation that women died in greater numbers because they are smaller and found it harder to muscle their way up to breathe or make their way out of the crowd,” the BBC grimly reported on Monday.

Roughly 80 percent of the confirmed fatalities were people under 30, and four were teenagers.

The American students killed in the crowd surge were identified as Kennesaw State University international business major Steven Blesi and University of Kentucky nursing student Anne Gieske, both 20 years of age. 

The Korea Herald reported on Monday that Korean victims included young actor Lee Ji-han and cheerleader Kim Yu-na.

South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol gave a live address from his presidential office on Sunday to announce a week of national mourning for the “truly horrific” disaster, which he said “should never have happened.”

“As president, who is responsible for the people’s lives and safety, my heart is heavy and I struggle to cope with my grief. The government will designate the period from today until the accident is brought under control as a period of national mourning and will place top priority in administrative affairs in recovery and follow-up measures,” Yoon said.

“The most important thing is to determine the cause of the accident and prevent similar accidents. We will thoroughly investigate the cause of the accident and make fundamental improvements so that similar accidents do not happen again in the future,” he pledged.

Prime Minister Han Duck-soo is leading a task force to investigate the incident. Investigators said they would examine video from over 50 government and private security cameras in the area, plus smartphone video uploaded to social media, to determine how the crowd surge began.

Han said “necessary institutional changes” would be made after his review is completed. He also asked people to stop spreading false information and graphic images of the stampede online.

“We are analyzing CCTVs to find out the exact cause of the accident. We will continue questioning more witnesses, including nearby shop employees,” lead police investigator Nam Gu-jun told reporters on Monday. 

The BBC cited criticism from anguished South Koreans who said the police provided woefully inadequate security for the Saturday night Itaewon festivities, dispatching only 137 officers to patrol the district when thousands have been deployed for security at concerts with much smaller crowds. Some officials conceded they might have underestimated how many young people would come out for Halloween celebrations after the end of pandemic restrictions.

“This is a human disaster, it wouldn’t have happened if the government had controlled public order. The government is responsible for this. The older generation is also responsible, they have voted wrongly,” raged Lee Insook, one of many mourners gathered at public memorials on Monday.

Eyewitnesses told the Associated Press that loud music and bad acoustics in the narrow alleyways might have confused the crowd and made it more likely to panic. 

One theory circulating on South Korean social media holds that a celebrity visitor was incorrectly rumored to be visiting an Itaewon bar. This theory seemed plausible given the hysterical crowd reactions surrounding top K-pop acts, but implausible to others because young celebrities regularly visit Itaewon without causing stampedes.