The Itaewon Halloween Tragedy - 159 Dead & How The Police Tried To Cover It Up

Bada bing, bada boom. Before we get started, I just want to give a content warning. There's going to be a lot of very graphic videos included in this episode. This event was recorded over and over again. There's just a lot out there. And I feel like a lot of the times you need to kind of hear from the families of the victims and you need to see some of the events that took place just to really understand how important it is that we help these families get justice. So huge content warning and with that being said, let's get into it. On October 30th, a man walked out of his tiny little shop in Etwan and he placed this pink piece of cloth into like this alleyway. He brings out this tray of food. He lights two candles and this elderly man, he gets on his knees in front of the food and he just starts he starts sobbing. Police immediately approach him and this alleyway is supposed to be closed off. They had it taped up. Nobody was allowed through. So what is this man doing? Remnants of the tragedy before were lingering everywhere. I mean there was if you look at this video, there's IDs, lost shoes, clothes, like everything is scattered throughout the alleyway. And the officer tells the old man, the police officer, "You can't do this. Like, you got to go. Grab your stuff. Come on. Let's go." The old man starts arguing back. He's like, "Don't do this right now. You have to let me do this. You have to let this go." The officer tells him, "Just take your food. We We got to go." And he screams, "No, you leave that right there." More officers start to show up at the scene and they start touching the food that he's laid out on the ground. They're trying to take it away. The man breaks down and he yells at them, "Don't you even dare touch the food." Finally, the man breaks down completely and he's sitting on the ground, cold cement, and he's just sobbing. The officer sits down with him and both of them start crying and he's like stroking the old man's back trying to console him. The old man had screamed at them, "The children need to have one last meal. One last meal. So, don't touch it. Don't you dare touch it. [music] He owns a shop in this alleyway. He's a business owner and he said that he tried his best to save as many people as he could, but so many more people died literally right in front of his eyes. 159 people died in the alleyway the night before and he wanted them to have one last meal. [music] [music] As always, full show notes are listed at rottenmangopodcast.com. There's a lot of videos that I've linked there. Please go watch them. And if you guys are watching the video podcast on YouTube at Rotteno or um on Spotify, all the videos are going to be in this video. And I'm just going to warn you, so many of these videos are so incredibly graphic and all of them just Yeah. So, with that being said, let's get into it. His parents were really worried about him. He was meeting with a therapist twice a week. He had onampus counseling in high school. It seemed like the parents were doing all of the right things. They were not ignoring his cries for help. They weren't saying, "Oh, he's just a 16-year-old teenager. Maybe he's just emotional." They were taking everything he was saying so very seriously. Their son had always been a bit of a quieter kid, but like a good kid. He listened to his parents. He studied, came home on time, and if he was out having fun, he was always with like the same two friends. They were like the three peas in a pod. They were the three musketeers. And now he just feels so alone. He feels like he's 16, completely isolated from the world. I mean, the parents did everything that they could to help. December 12th of 2022. So, not too long ago, just a few months ago, just a few weeks before Christmas, the parents get a text message from their son, and he says, "I'm sorry, Mom and Dad. Please don't forget me. Please, you must remember me. I'm going to go meet up with my friends." His friends had died in the Itan Halloween crowd search just 43 days ago. The crowd search that killed 159 people and injured nearly 200 others. And now their son would take his life in a motel bathroom because he couldn't bear to carry this like incredibly heavy burden of being the only survivor in his friend group. Literally, nobody could have ever imagined what was going to happen that night in it. I'm sure you guys have heard of what happened there Halloween weekend of 2022. And if there were a few people that knew it was dangerous, it definitely wasn't the parents of the people in attendance. They would never have let their kids go if they knew anything bad was going to happen. By all accounts, all these people in attendance, they were responsible adults. There were some that were in high school, some even as young as middle school, but their parents knew exactly where they were going. They just wanted to celebrate. So, I kind of need to talk to you about how the night starts. So, you you just see how normal it is. It wasn't like, oh, these people, they went to this dangerous area and risked their lives to celebrate. Like, they went to this area that everyone was like, oh, we're warning you, don't go here. It's so so bad. Absolutely not. Like, that's not what happened at all. I did see some online discourse of people being like, well, these people were being young and drunk and reckless, and this is what happens when they all gather in one spot. I completely disagree. For example, Mr. and Mrs. A, that's what we're going to call them. They're sitting in the car, October 29th of 2022, and they're on their way to this super fancy restaurant. They're smiling at each other in the car. I'm sure they felt really excited and kind of giddy, like they had worked so hard in the past what, like three decades to raise their family, and now their kids finally all grown up. So, the parents, they're living the life. happened. It was also the dad's birthday and their 25-year-old daughter had just made them reservations at one of the fanciest restaurants in town. She texted her dad, "Go have fun with mom. Also, thank you for raising me. I'll repay you in the future. Haha." She wouldn't be joining them as she was going to go with some friends to celebrate Halloween in Itan. So, the whole car ride, they're just smiling at each other. I mean, they had raised their kids to be such incredible adults. In another part of horror, a dad watched his daughter get ready for Halloween festivities. She was dressed up as Princess Jasmine from Aladdin. Um, this is her. [laughter] And he remembered he he actually made fun of her. He was like this full-g grown kid. She was putting on a fashion show for me. And she twirled around and she was like, "Appa, this is what I'm wearing. Don't I look pretty?" I'm sure he was a bit worried that his daughter was going out, but that's very normal. I mean, no parent ever really stops worrying. Same as another father in So his daughter told him that she was going to eat Taiwan for Halloween. He completely trusted her to be safe. She's just always like all these other kids. I mean, she's just always been this really well- behaved kid. She knew the rules. She followed them. She's the type that would write him these lengthy letters for his birthday. The two had this really intense bond. So 3 years before Itan, he was diagnosed with leukemia and his daughter was a match. So, they transplanted bone marrow from her to save his life. And she would write to him while he's recovering in the hospital. And she wrote, "I'm so happy to have been born your daughter. You're the only one that I can rely on. So, please don't get sick again, okay? Take good care of yourself, Dad. I need you to stay with me for like another 70 years. You have to cook me seaweed soup even when I'm like 96 years old. You know, I don't like any other people's seaweed soup. I love you, Dad. You're the best." By the end of the night, she would be dead. And he would cry out, "You told me you wanted me to stay with you for 70 years. You wanted me to cook you seaweed soup until you were 96. You promised." Before we get there, let me tell you about Halloween in South Korea. If you're going to be anywhere in Korea for Halloween, like the first Halloween after CO restrictions have been lifted was October of 2022. 3 years it was going to be Ethan. If you were going to go anywhere to celebrate, it is a city that's located inside of Zur and it's above the Han River. It's typically known as just a place with incredibly fun, lively night life. Like that's what people go to for. They've got bars, restaurants, nightclubs, shops that open late. It's just like this gathering center. It's also a super popular destination for foreigners. Like the energy just feels really unique there. There's even this famous Kdrama called Itan Class. And there's actually a famous quote in that series that says, "Most people just come to Itan for Halloween." So October 29th of 2022, partygoers are spending hours in front of their bathroom mirrors like putting on their face makeup, their costume, their fixing their hair, their wigs, their everything, adjusting their dresses and their pants. And businesses were equally as busy. Like Halloween in Ewan that weekend, insane. They're making sure they got all the inventory that came in. Like, they got to get all the soju glasses. They're turning up the music. I mean, they're doing everything to make sure that everyone's going to have a good time. They're prepping their ingredients for all the food. I mean, there's going to be about 130,000 people coming through Ewan, which is a pretty small area. Wow. So, like, think about it. The city is H. This is like a part of the major city. Even taxi drivers were on standby nearan just waiting to take all the drunk people home. And I think it's important to note for weekends like this, it's a boost in the city's economy. And this is important later. So the whole city of Itan, they're prepping for this big Halloween weekend. It's literally been 3 years since Itan had a Halloween because of, you know, the pandemic. This is the first time that mask mandates have been lifted for Halloween. So let's talk transportation. Let's talk about the logistics of this night. Most citizens that were heading into Ewan, they were not going to drive. You know, they're going to take the Korean subway. First of all, most people take the subway to begin with, it's the easiest way to move around. And parking would have been absolutely horrific in Itan that night. Most people were planning on drinking, so they're not driving. And this is so important to note. It subway station drops you off right smack dab, like in the middle of Itan, right next to this little alleyway. I'm going to put up a bunch of maps, but they'll also be in the show notes. Now, this little alleyway is important because it connects the main road that has the subway station and the world street food road, which is like where all the bars and restaurants are. So, a lot of people will travel through this alleyway to get from the train station to the busiest part of it. Some people will leave itan by taking this little alleyway. Now, during the day, this alleyway looks just unassuming. It's just this narrow little space. There's restaurant entrances up and down both sides. There's even a hotel called the Hamilton Hotel located on the alleyway. Okay, so the main entrance for the hotel isn't in the alleyway, but it's like the building is right there. To me, it just looks like your stereotypical alleyway in one of the big cities. Like space is tight. The places are going to be tight. I'm going to give you a bunch of pictures on just how narrow it is. It's about 10 ft wide and about 130 ft long and it's on a hill so it slopes downward. Another thing to note is that the road is not paved over in like a smooth cement. Okay, I wouldn't say it's as intense as cobblestone, but it's like a brick floor where some bricks protrude out more than others. And you can definitely tell that some parts of this hill, this downward slope, they're uneven. So even without a crowd, it's the kind of alleyway where if you were walking down with your friend, you would try to keep an eye out cuz you could easily trip. It's that kind of rocky. Now take this alleyway and imagine two horizontal roads, big roads. One road is the main party street for Itawan called Itwan World Food Street and the other road has the Ittoan subway station on there. And the easiest way to get from these two parallel roads is this tiny little alleyway. So throughout the entire Halloween night, people are up and down this alleyway getting to and from the subway station. And as the night is progressing, there were what now seems like the first warning signs. There were a few people that were pushed down or accidentally shoved in this alleyway. Now, I mean, I'm sure the party energy, the alcohol, I'm sure it had something to do with it, but most of it was due to the alleyway, like the crowds, the foot traffic, the uneven floorings, the slope. But everyone responded to these mini accidents in a very normal way. Everyone would freeze, make sure the person got back up, was good, and then everyone would keep walking again. That's kind of to be expected. What's not to be expected is nearly 200 people dying in this alleyway. The first 911 call of the night was made at 6:30 p.m. The incident doesn't happen until about 10:00. Wow. So that's um 3 and 1/2 hour earlier. 3 and 1/2 hours earlier, people started realizing something wasn't right. Like things are going to get weird. So, in Korea, it's 112, the emergency line. But someone called to report to the police. Hey, the alleyway near the Hamilton Hotel is getting dangerous. People are going up and down this tiny little alleyway. Some people are struggling to get down the alleyway because people keep pushing them up. Like, I barely made it out of the alleyway. It's getting that crowded. It's getting bad. I think you guys need to send some people down here and try to control the situation. The police on the other end asked, "Are people going to fall down and cause a huge accident?" Yeah, it's really dangerous. You need to do something. Okay, thanks for calling. We're going to send someone out to check it out. For hours, nobody checked it out. But that's weird cuz don't you need to have police present when there's big crowd anyways? Yeah. So, that's the argument that people have and why I said it's so important. The fact that Halloween weekend is an economic weekend, it boosts the economy of the city. So, anytime there's these events that are held, police are part of the planning. It's all part of city planning. Yeah, that's what police officers get arrested. 7 p.m. A large crowd gets stuck in the alleyway. I do think several things play a factor in how things would turn out this first time. It's 7:00 p.m. The party is just getting started. It seemed people were drunk, but more than that, people were just excited to be there. Keep this in mind. And it's not that big of a crowd. So there's a crowd stuck in the alleyway and it seems like an accident is just waiting to happen. So a woman in the crowd, she senses this danger. She climbs up to up onto a ledge in the alleyway where she can see both ways and she starts directing the crowd like you know a traffic police officer. She's urging everyone, hey, go down the slope first. Everybody move to the side and then people going up the slope can come up afterwards. It sounds easy. I mean it sounds like why didn't they do this the next time it happened? But it wasn't easy by any means. Like the crowd was moving basically inch by inch. That's how jam-packed it was. It was not like a, "Hey everyone, to the right, to the left." They're inching forward and backward. But I still think it was at a point where it was manageable. Everyone was yelling to everyone, "Listen to the woman. Get down the alleyway first." The music wasn't that loud yet. People weren't, you know, out and about for that long. And just in general, there weren't that many people in the alleyway. But after this crowd is able to get through the alleyway, there's like this lingering feeling. This is not a good situation. At first, in the beginning of the night, all the posts about Itan that night were, "Oh my god, it is going to be crazy. It's going to be fun. It's so exciting. Look at all the places that are open. Look at these costumes people are wearing." It It was a good thing. It was a positive feeling. But throughout the night, more posts were popping up about how dangerous things were starting to feel. Someone straight up tweeted, "Wildly unsafe in Ethan right now." They showed some pictures of the intense crowds. It wasn't just social media being made aware of this situation. A lot of people in it called the police, which I think is interesting because technically no crime had taken place yet, but the fact that a lot of these civilians could see that things were escalating, I think that goes to show you how unprepared the city was for this event. Like, it's just insane. One survivor said, "It was around 8:00 p.m. when I went into the alleyway, and it was like hell." So, this is even before the incident. They said there were already a ton of people in the alleyway and I couldn't get into the alleyway. I couldn't even get in. So, there's multiple directions that people are coming in from. On both sides of the alleyway, there's two directions people are flowing in from. Okay. Like this, right? Yeah. And she said, "I couldn't get in after waiting for an hour to start walking down the alleyway." My friend and I were like, "Okay, we can't do this. Like, let's turn around." They tried to turn around. They're like, "Okay, we've been waiting here for an hour. We haven't even started walking down the alleyway, but it was impossible to turn around because they were jam-packed. People were pushing up behind him. I mean, they were literally trapped. Someone was pushing them down the alleyway. People in front of them were pushing back on them. She said that she heard people behind her screaming, "Squeeze in. Squeeze in." Like, "Come on, let's get down the alleyway." But in front of her, people were screaming, "Help me stop." Like, "I can't breathe. Stop pushing." This was 8:00. Yeah. The scariest part that she said was she fell. She said a person in front of me fell and I fell with them and everyone behind me started falling like dominoes. Right. So there was like a little incident where everyone started tripping and she said someone was under me. I was under someone and people were on top of me. I could barely breathe. I was calling for help and I felt like the music was drowning me out. Nobody could even hear me. And then finally someone like dragged her to the side into one of the bars. They later left the alley slowly along the wall, but it was just as crowded as they left. So things they're clearly clearly getting worse and worse. One caller told the police before the tragedy, and I repeat, before the tragedy, they called the police and said, "I feel like I'm going to get crushed." When I was in that alleyway, a lot of people were just getting squashed. It's pure chaos out here. Please help. Send help. The officer on the other line reassured her that help was on the way. Records show that they were not on the way. Out of numerous phone calls that were made to the police that night, the police only sent out officers four times and apparently they didn't do anything. I don't know if maybe they didn't feel like anything was wrong, maybe they didn't care to find out. Honestly, I don't know. But it is noted the police did not dispatch anyone after calls were made from 9:00 p.m. and onward. So, an hour leading up to the tragedy, the police sent no officers to the site and they were getting tens of calls. And it it's truly is not that nobody was alerting them that something was wrong. In fact, someone even walked into the police station to tell them. A live streamer, let's call her G, G was live streaming in itan that night. And you know, the night started off great, but soon the roads, the alleyways, they got so crowded. She's being pushed and shoved to the point where she had a cross body bag on and the strap broke and her purse was just gone cuz it fell. And she can't even look around at the ground cuz it's just so filled with people. She tries to look for it briefly, but the crowd is so intense. She goes to the Itan police station to report her purse missing. But also, I mean, she's warning them like this is how crazy the crowds are. Like, you don't think that's crazy that this happened with my purse? Like, nobody stole it. It broke because I was being pushed and shoved. She said, "When I was there in the alleyway, I even saw people shouting that they had fallen and that they had gotten hurt. Like, you guys need to do something about it. The crowd is getting out of control. Somebody's going to get hurt." The police ignored her. They instead focused on the fact that they're like, "Oh, well, we're going to keep an eye out on your purse. Hopefully, someone turns it in tomorrow to lost and found." What's going on? Oh, it gets really The conspiracies come too It's really crazy. So, I mean, the question, I guess, is did the police just really think that nothing bad was going to happen? But they were wrong. The tragedy happened 1 hour after she reported it to the police. a 24-year-old South Korean streamer, let's call him Mr. A. He was live streaming and his time in Itawan, like I said with the other live streamer, at first you see him laughing. He's smiling on the stream. He is walking through the crowds. There's people in costumes dancing, having fun. And then slowly the initial joy just starts dissipating. Those laughters suddenly morph into people's screams and cries. And at one point, even the streamer is crying for help because he had walked into the alleyway and got caught in the crowd surge. So he said the space got tighter and tighter and tighter and the pressure became unbearable. He said there was this girl next to him and she was much much shorter than him. She was screaming for help. He tried to give her as much space as possible but it was difficult. And in the end he said that he saw her face turn purple and then she stopped screaming. and then she died. The streamer said the only reason he was alive was a guy in a blue denim jacket helped him climb up into this small ledge on on the wall of the alleyway. It was like a small staircase ledge, like a mini balcony. And the streamer said that once he got up there, he started helping other people onto the ledge, saving them from the crowd. And there was this moment where people on the ledge looked at each other and one of the guys told him, "Please don't pull more people up. It's already too crowded. And the streamer said, "Okay, just one more." He helped save about 5 to 10 people from the crowd. And remember the denim jacket guy that helped him get onto the ledge in the first place? Yeah. He stayed in the crowd and let the weaker people climb up on him to get to the ledge. Um, he survived. He did make it up to the ledge at the end and he stayed behind to help administer CPR later. It's speculated that the man in the denim jacket saved more than 10 people that night. But the crowd started getting tighter and tighter till literally hundreds hundreds of people were trapped in the alleyway. The space of the alleyway is said to have been the size of maybe like half a classroom. Think of that many people in this small amount of space. They're not able to communicate because the music is so loud. The floors are uneven. It's so easy to trip. It's just insane. Obviously, I don't know what that would have felt like. I've never been in that situation. But there were a lot of people who survived the surge. And they described it as, "I saw a man with this flashing baton trying to signal people to move back, but you can't move back. It doesn't even matter if someone's giving you directions. It's so crowded. You can't move. Even if everyone wants to move, you can't move." So, like I said, this crowd surge was different from the first one. You know, the first one that I told you about that didn't turn into an accident because the woman on the ledge, there were way too many people this time. So even if there were people taking initiative trying to navigate the crowds, there was no space. The amount of coordination something like that would have taken nearly impossible in these conditions. And even then, who knows if it would have worked. People in the crowd said that they saw several people trying to look up at the sky, looking for some sort of like direction, some air. They looked like they were getting laded, like they were going to faint. They couldn't even reach their arms up to protect their um their lungs. So that's like the first thing they tell you to do in a crowd search is to try to give your lungs space. So you put up your arms in almost a defensive boxing position. They couldn't even lift their arms. Most of the ones in the center of the crowd, they couldn't even reach their hands to look at their phones that they were holding in their hands. Many of them had missed calls from their parents. One mother texted her daughter, "Where are you? Where are you? I'm losing my mind. I'm going crazy cuz I'm so worried. Please respond just so I know where you are. Please just tell me you're safe. The mother had her daughter's name saved on her phone as my oldest princess. She would never respond. There is a video of the situation. Well, there's multiple videos of the situation where you can see just how dire the situation is. There's some videos where you can see a man trying to cling onto a brick that's protruding from the wall. And it's just it's just really graphic. I know it might be puzzling. Um, some of the videos they show a different perspective where there looks to be some sort of space between the crowd and like an opening. And I saw a lot of comments that were like, why don't they just all move forward? There's space. I don't get it. At this point, what the video isn't showing is that there's people stacked on top of each other on the ground in front of that space. There's no way for anyone standing to move forward. People had fallen. They were stacked so high the people behind them were blocked. It's said that the worst part of the crowd surge, people were stacked on top of each other, 13 feet tall. Situations like this, it's it's like a domino effect. One person falls down and because of the force of others pressing into you, it's very likely that another person's going to fall. You say 13 ft. That's way taller than the ceiling. Yeah, cuz it's going downhill and stuff. Again, this has nothing to do with anyone being drunk. I don't really like it when people make it out to be, oh, a bunch of drunk people. Of course, they're going to trip and fall. They're going to wreak havoc. This is more about just plain physics. It wouldn't matter if we're talking about church aims on a Sunday after drinking tea. Like, this is about physics. It has nothing to do with alcohol because of the slope and inertia. Like I said, one person falls, it's going to be a domino effect. People are just going to start collapsing. And even if you don't fall, that doesn't mean that you're going to be fine. the pressure of all these people pushing into you, it would cause your lungs to not be able to inflate with oxygen. If 10 people are pushing onto you with their body weight and more, or let's say they're on top of you, which by the way, there looks to be way more than 10 people pushing onto everyone. Let's say they're on top of you. That could be similar to 1,000 lbs of weight pressing straight onto your chest. It's going to be very, very difficult for you to breathe. It's incredibly dangerous, incredibly real, incredibly terrifying. A person may lose consciousness 30 seconds after being severely crushed, and they would suffocate after about 6 minutes. Side note, I know a lot of people in the beginning when news first broke of what happened. I saw a lot of people wondering if it was a stampede, which is you're getting run over by a group of people, like they're running on top of you. But it wasn't. It wasn't someone being trampled to death. This was more like quicksand, like being trapped in quicksand. People were pushing up against one another, falling, stacking on top of each other. It's like you're suffocating because you're unable to expand your chest to bring in air. Many of the victims would pass out while they were still standing up. So, it wasn't a stampede. It's categorized as a crowd surge. Most people who were in the crowd, they remembered vividly about how it felt. They were being lifted off the ground. Their feet weren't even touching the ground anymore. And that's why there's so many shoes that were left behind because that's how strong I mean the pressure from all sides. They were just being pushed and shoved. And that pressure it's like they're being held in the air by it. I imagine it's like the feeling of being caught in this powerful wave in the ocean. Like you don't stand a chance when you're there. Your body is pushed, shoved, thrown off balance. The force is so strong. Like what can you do? And in this situation, survival might solely depend on where you're positioned when it happens. There's a 21-year-old Malaysian named Ragu and he was lost in the crowd search. He called his best friend Kim while he was stuck in the crowd surge. And Kim said Ragu was this hard worker. He worked in construction so that he could earn money to send back to his parents back home in Malaysia. He was just this patient and kind soul that just wanted to support his family. He called him in the crowd and he told his friend Kim, "I'm having a hard time breathing." He also told him, "There's a woman next to me who's fainting and I'm trying to get her medical attention. She needs help very quickly." He told Kim that he's trying to find ways to escape the crowd search because this woman, this stranger, really needed help. Kim is anxiously staying on the phone with him, and I'm sure that he felt just helpless because he can't do anything for his friend. And then suddenly Ragu told him that the woman he was trying to save, the stranger next to him, her hand had gotten cold and not too long after the phone was disconnected. That was the last time Kim would hear from his friend. He died that night. [clears throat] At around 10:30 p.m., the fire department starts receiving calls that 10 people have been pushed down to the ground and crushed. So again, I don't think it was just 10 people, but I think in the vicinity, people who were able to access their phones saw about 10 people. They reported that people were having difficulties breathing. A few minutes later, the first four ambulances were dispatched. Then six more came just a few moments later. Police officers start arriving at the scene, and they're unable to control the crowds. Now, it's important to note that there are, if you select police officers to judge for not taking action quicker, but a lot of the ones that were dispatched in this moment, they were just genuinely trying their best to help. They were not the ones making executive decisions of who goes where. They were going where their superiors told them to go. They were not the ones picking up the phone about this and crowd surge. They were just told to go there. So, they show up not knowing what's going on. There's a video. Police Officer Kim, he wasn't even dispatched to the scene. He was on duty nearby and he happened across the situation. So, he stops and he tries to take action. He said that when he got to the alleyway, he made his way through the crowd. He saw that civilians, regular civilians, were already taking initiative, pulling people out and doing CPR on them. So, he's like, "Okay, okay, this is what we need to do. You know, we need to try to figure out the best course of action in this chaos." He and his colleague decide that the best thing that they can do is redirect the crowds to stay away from the alleyway, away from the Hamilton Hotel because you add more people in the mix. It's just not good. They also needed space for rescue work. So, he starts trying to direct the crowds and it was hard. So, these crowds, most of these people have no idea what's going on in the alleyway. These are people that are about to funnel into the alleyway and they're moving past him and he's in police uniform, but so are a lot of people. Oh, it's Halloween. Oh my gosh. And he's trying to get everyone to walk away from the alleyway because it's utter chaos over there. People are dying. People are suffocating, falling down, collapsing. And if you watch the video of him, there's like this almost primal desperation in his eyes. He's trying to talk to the people that are moving away from him. And these people, they're inches away from his face, and it seems like nobody's listening. Either they can't hear them through the music. It It's nightmare fuel. When you're screaming, no one can hear you. You're the only one that knows that doom is happening. There's panic. He's trying to scream over the music. Please go home. Do us a favor, everyone. Please go home. Don't go further. Please go back. Please don't go forward. You can literally feel the fear through the video. You got [music] your feet down. He's trying to yell at them to go the other way, away from the search. He tried his best to warn the crowds. He tried to warn everyone that people were dying and they all needed to leave. It was dangerous and nobody was really listening. He was later interviewed and he said that he didn't have a megaphone on him because he wasn't dispatched to the scene. He was just on duty. He stumbled upon the dire situation. So, I imagine he wasn't even driving around in like a cop car. I imagine that he was like on patrol duty. He said if we went back to the precinct to get a megaphone, we would have lost too much valuable time. And he cried on the interview and he said, "In the end, a lot of people ended up dying." And I kept thinking to myself, if I had hurried, if I had a megaphone on me, if I handled the situation differently, in a better way, maybe we might have saved one more person. And that's why I'm at a loss for words, and I'm so sorry to the families who have lost their loved ones. He said, "I tried my best to rescue them, and I'm sorry. I just couldn't. I couldn't. foreign speech. It The situation literally couldn't have been worse. I know there's a lot of discourse about what's wrong with these partygoers. People are dying. Why aren't they listening to the police? What's wrong with them? But that's not everyone. I mean, I would like to believe it was a small group of people. It's not like everyone just stood around watching. People, they tried really hard. There was a photographer visiting from China and he went to Itto and thinking he would take a lot of cool pictures since he heard the costumes were going to be going all out this year. He finds himself crushed in the alleyway instead. He's hanging on to this pole to prevent himself from losing balance and falling over and he was standing behind these two women. Every time like a wave of pushing would come, he would grab onto these women. He said he tried to stabilize them because he knew if they fell over they would be dead. There would be no getting back up in this situation. He wanted to make sure that they were okay even when he himself was not doing okay. And there were others like him. Um he said he looked into the crowd and saw this family. So a mom, dad, and a kid that seemed to be maybe 3 4 years old. The dad was holding on to the baby above the crowd so the child wouldn't get crushed. And side note, it seemed like the family was passing through to get home or to the station. It's not like they were out partying for Halloween with their kid. They get stuck in the crowd and they're screaming for help. He said that he saw the crowd working together to pass the child from the parents to a nearby um business in the alleyway. So, when the photographer made it back out alive, he went back to his hotel. He's so shaken up. I mean, he only had like three pictures in his camera roll that night and all of them were before the tragedy and everyone just seems to be so happy just connecting with each other. And he said that his hands are shaking when his wife called him. They just had a baby so she just gave birth recently and she's calling from China and this is so heartbreaking. But she called and asked about his night and he said he came home because he just wasn't feeling it. He didn't want to tell her that he had witnessed one of the most horrific incidents of his entire life. He didn't tell her that he stood there watching people die next to him. He said that he didn't want to worry his wife until he got home. Like even during the most traumatic moments of these people's lives, even during a situation where it was life or death, a lot of these people were still putting others first. A little girl had gotten lost in the crowd. She was separated from the adults that she had come with. Um, she had momentarily fallen down and she felt a man helping her regain balance. And if he hadn't, she likely would have been crushed to death. She didn't know his name. She didn't have the chance to thank him. Witnesses said that the man who helped her ended up getting stuck after he pulled her out and he ended up passing away. His name was Eihan and his name might sound familiar, but he was a 24year-old actor in South Korea. He was on a few different shows and he was always known to be very um in Korean it's called meoki which means very charismatic. So he'd be on these shows and he would laugh and these like reality shows and he would always cover his mouth very shyly. It just he just felt like such a genuine person. And the most heartbreaking part about this is that he had just signed to star in a new NBC fantasy drama that would have been his breakout role. like that would have been that was the role he had been looking for like his whole career. And he had what it took. He was good at his job. He was he was able to make people fall in love with these characters. He just wouldn't get the time. The little girl's parents expressed their gratitude and apologized to Etien's family for his act of courage. So, all the while this is happening in the middle of the crowd, just to show you how chaotic this whole incident was, some people at the top of the hill didn't even realize that there were people being trampled down at the bottom. Some of them didn't even realize how dire the situation was becoming. They were just excited to get down there and have fun. And we're going to talk more about this later, but there are online speculations that a group of people had caused the crowd surge and had started pushing people down. More on that later, but for now, at 11 p.m., 30 more ambulances were deployed to the scene. as well as more personnel, more authorities, national disaster medical assistance teams, firefighters, policemen, they're all finally being dispatched to it. Finally, at 11:19, Halloween in Itan was called off. 10 minutes to midnight, the fire department issued a stage 3 order, which is usually reserved for large-scale disasters. It was too late. I mean, first of all, they arrived a bit too late. I mean, even when the personnel got there, it's not like they could do much. They're just trying to resuscitate people. It was pure chaos. Add to that, there were a ton of partygoers who were wearing paramedic uniforms. They look like doctors, nurses, police, firefighters. The music is still blasting. I mean, it's hard to even decipher what the hell is going on, who to listen to. Like, what's going on? It was chaos. And of course, the question is, if authorities had gotten there sooner, if the victims had been treated immediately, could they have been saved? I'm not a medical professional, but a lot of medical professionals online speculated that yeah, some of them, a lot of them could have been saved. Usually after 4 to 5 minutes of enduring this level of pressure and lack of oxygen, you start heading into severe brain damage territory. So time is of the essence. I would say that there's a few different types of people that weren't a part of the crowd search. There is the ones that were inside. So these are partygoers that were inside bars, restaurants that weren't connected to the alleyway. They probably came outside and saw all hell break loose and they had no idea what's going on. Then you have groups of people in other parts of Etwan that hadn't seen what happened in the alleyway yet. So they don't know what's going on. They're partying on the other side of Etwan. They're living up their Halloween weekend. Then you have those who saw what's going on and they fled. They left. They were terrified. Then there were those who stayed and tried to help authorities with CPR. And then there were a group of people, and I would like to say this is the smallest group of people that saw what happened, heard people were dying, and they continued to party. There's a viral clip of a bunch of people partying on the side of the street while ambulances and medical staff are performing CPR on the other side, like in plain sight. Yeah. And this is the first clip I saw of Itan on the night that it happened. You think these people know what's going on? A lot of people think they do. I would like to speculate that maybe they didn't know. In their defense, they said that there were a high number of ambulances present. So maybe they just thought it was like a precautionary measure, but they were literally fist pumping to the song on the beach. I mean, the visual impact has been a lot. So, while ambulance lights are flickering around them, they're singing, dancing, and to make matters worse, it said that a lot of people were so busy filming the ambulances while partying, they were blocking the medical staff from getting to the victims. Koreans could not for the life of them understand how that could have even happened. How could people be doing that? After the crowd surge, the alleyway slowly starts getting cleared. And now we're just dealing with the aftermath, trying to rush everyone to get medical attention. There were hundreds of people laying there motionless, needing CPR and needing it fast. So Anna was originally from Spain and she had come out to Itan with her friends for Halloween night. She walked into the bar that night with her friends. People in costumes were laughing, taking pictures. I mean, it was it was a great night. And then when she walked out, it was just like an apocalypse. She didn't even have time to take it all in. People start running up to her and her friends and they're like, "Do you know how to perform CPR? Anna didn't know, her friends did. So, they're like, "Hurry, follow me." Anna's friends run off without her. She's completely alone, just standing in front of this restaurant, like confused. 3 minutes later, her friends come back and they're crying and they're screaming. We tried to save them. We just tried to save like five or six people, but they died. Anna runs with them to go help more people. And she said, "I didn't know what I was doing. I just followed the others. They told me to hold these people's heads, open their mouths, and I tried, but they all died. The people we tried to help, they had already stopped breathing. There was nothing we could do. It was so traumatic. It was total pandemonium. I mean, sirens and screams and cries. Music is still blasting. Paramedics are doing CPR in the middle of the road. Partygoers are stopping and watching. Some of them are performing CPR. The only lighting is coming from the brightly colored neon lights of the bars and the ambulances. Random civilians started taking charge and administering CPR most likely to girlfriends, boyfriends, best friends, their sisters. Like you see these people trying to get them to come back and it's just so desperate. A Pakistani nurse was visiting his brother that lives in Korea. They went to Itan just to see what Halloween was like in Korea. He ended up surviving and he helped with the CPR efforts that night. He performed CPR on roughly 15 to 30 people that night. Now, if you guys have performed CPR, it's physically incredibly taxing. It's not just like you're using your whole body. These people were drenched in sweat. He said that he worked all night long and he saw everyone working so hard. People didn't even know who anyone was. They're just doing everything they can to try and save some people. I just want you to listen. He is speaking Korean and he's saying, "I'm a nurse. I know how to do this." But, and if you don't know Korean, you might not understand, but you hear people screaming in the background and they're screaming, "Help me. Help me." He pretty much worked all into the night and the next morning he got home with his brother and he said he couldn't even fall asleep because all he heard were the screams of everyone screaming, "Help me! Help me!" And he said even months later, he can't close his eyes without hearing people screaming, "Help me! Help me! Also in the crowd, there was a college couple who were getting married in May of 2023. So, in just a few months from when you're seeing this. They had been in the crowd and the man did everything to try and protect his girlfriend. He tried to shield her body with his own body and he made sure that she didn't fall, but he ended up losing consciousness and the two were separated in the crowd. He woke up. Medical staff were like, "Okay, well, you need to go to the hospital right now." He refused. He rushed to find his girlfriend who was laying there just on the cold ground and he performed CPR for over an hour and she wouldn't come back. And there's more on the CPR situation we need to talk about. So most of the victims were women naturally due to height and smaller stature. Most of the victims who passed were women. The paramedics were going around and they were unbuttoning their shirts because that's how you do CPR. It's easier for them to breathe. Apparently, this is very standard. What's not standard is some onlookers pulled out their phones and tried to record videos. The victims were being administered CPR in attempt to save their lives. Some people thought to film it for the internet because they were partially unclothed. People were crying out loud, "Stop filming, everyone. Stop. Stop filming. just help. The their bottoms were uncovered. Even their shoes were missing. A lot of Koreans were upset because for these victims, even in their last moments, it's like they were being robbed of their dignity. It was just a gut-wrenching feeling. There were hundreds of people down in the ground at this point. Once the chaos was somewhat contained in terms of the chaos of the alleyway and the partygoers were shuffled out, the victims were rushed to ambulances and to the hospitals. But by this point, it's too late. Most of the bodies were laying on the side of the road with blankets covering them. Their bodies were being put on stretchers to be taken to the hospital, but there were no signs of life really. Most of the victims had already passed, but they had been left just on the road for more than an hour because there were too many victims that rescuers couldn't transport them all to the hospital quickly enough. A Chinese student who was in Korea at the time, she was in one of the big bars of Etwan, and she had no idea any of this was going on. She said she walked outside at 2:00 a.m. Remember, the crowd search started happening around 10:15. She walked out and she felt like the world had ended quite literally. She said that there were paramedics everywhere doing CPR on lifeless bodies. There were still sirens. She said, "I saw rows of people covered with cloth blankets, and I felt like I was confronted with corpses." The first official death toll was issued by authorities at 2:30 in the morning. They stated 59 people had died and 150 people were injured. An hour later, the numbers rose to 120 people that were dead with 100 injured and it would rise again. And side note about these injured, um I I know sometimes we hear these numbers and you're like, "Well, what does injured mean? Like, do they have small scratches? Like, what's going on?" I'm pretty sure it varies, but it's pretty bad. People had broken bones everywhere, fractures, they were going to need surgeries, non-stop medical attention. A lot of the injuries were life-changing, and if they weren't, they were really horrific. There was a Chinese survivor, let's call her Miss. She said she barely survived the crowd surge. Even thinking about what happened that night, she feels like she's suffocating. She said she thinks it helped that she was relatively tall compared to the other people in the crowd, but it just felt like hundreds and hundreds of pounds were pressing on her chest. She could barely stretch her neck up to breathe. She said her neck was cramped to one side and she couldn't move it back forward. She couldn't move it to the other side. Her neck was like perpetually stuck looking to her left and she was forced to watch the girl on her left die. She suffocated and she couldn't even turn away because she didn't have room to move her neck. Soon after that, she felt something strange on her back and she later realized that the person behind her was throwing blood up on her. A lot of people actually vomited. Um, a lot of the dead bodies were seen with vomit around their faces because when you suffocate to death, often times you do vomit. She said that it was so tight she couldn't even move her fingers and it felt like 300 people were just pushing her and her legs went numb for about an hour. She couldn't feel her legs. Eventually, she was carried out by a firefighter to the roadside. She was rushed to the hospital. She said she still needs to get X-rays for her chest because it's been really hard for her to breathe. Like it hurts when she takes a breath. Another survivor, Juliana, she's a 23-year-old student from Mexico who is studying in so she said she went with a friend to Ewan and as they were heading into the subway station to go home at 10 p.m. The minute that they stepped into the alleyway, Juliana and her friend were separated. It was pure chaos. She said it was like this uncontrollable force that was pushing her down. her feet lifted from the ground and she couldn't go back, she couldn't go forward. Whatever the crowd was moving in, whatever direction, that's where she was going. An unconscious person fell on top of Juliana and she said it was pure panic. She started hyperventilating. She had to calm herself down. She started blacking out. The noise of the crowd started feeling quieter and quieter and she couldn't feel her legs. She couldn't even move a single toe. She said she started thinking, "Okay, yeah, I'm going to be next." It felt like she was just waiting for death. And somehow, by some miracle, a young man standing on a high platform on the on the edge of the alleyway was able to wiggle her out and save her. She had been trapped like that for nearly 50 minutes. She said she looked around and there were dead bodies everywhere. And she was severely shaken up, but she went home that night and she thought it was just nerves, but the next day she had a crazy fever. She was hospitalized and diagnosed with necrosis of her leg. Basically, when blood flow is cut off from a part of your body, the tissues start to die. In severe cases, this can be fatal. It's when your limbs literally start dying and it can start spreading. Thankfully, she's recovering, but the pain is really bad. One of her legs is still very blue, very swollen. She can't walk properly. If she even breathes too hard or too fast, she feels immense chest pain. And these are just the physical injuries. In the end, 159 people died in the Halloween tragedy. including the deaths of 26 foreign citizens from 14 different nations. The overwhelming majority uh were Korean citizens and women. 102 women and 57 men. 158 died from suffocation and one person later committed suicide. 196 people were physically injured physically. Keep this in mind. That's not including mental, emotional, because the trauma that these survivors, the the first responders, the fire department, the trauma that this whole nation is going to carry with them. I mean, the real number of those impacted and injured and the families of the victims whose lives are just never going to be the same. Like, there's no way to put a definitive number on that. Like, it's hard to put a number on a whole nation's pain. So, when news breaks of this, parents are glued to their phones. And it sounds selfish to say, but many of them were probably thinking, I hate myself for thinking this, but please God, like, let it not be my kids. Many parents were alerted later on by officials that their child had passed away. And they didn't believe it because I mean, just think about how shocking that is. It How do you comprehend that? Your kids go out, they're going to be home relatively early. They talked to you just an hour or two ago. Many of the kids were going out to eat with friends. One mother of a victim said, "I didn't believe it until we got to the hospital. I didn't believe it until I saw my own son with my own two eyes." And she said, "Since then, her whole family has been broken. Her husband, the victim's father, has attempted suicide. And their daughter, who sees them in pain, she cries to them, "It should have been me that died. It should have been me instead." Another mom rushed to the hospital only to see that her daughter had died. And she said, "It's truly devastating to identify your own child. When I go to bed, I can't get that picture out of my head, so I can't sleep anymore." The parents, they couldn't understand what had happened to her. So, they got her phone and they said at 9:35 p.m., their daughter was taking pictures smiling in a bar. Then, at 10 p.m., she texted her friend that she was going to go home now. She's going to go to the E10 station and go home. She took a couple more pictures smiling and then on her way to the subway station, the crowd she got caught in the crowd surge and died. Her friend who survived later said that they weren't even trying to use that alleyway to get to the station. It was so crowded up until that alleyway. It's like they got sucked into it like a vacuum. Her friend ended up surviving and she said it was so bad. She lost her shoes. Her feet weren't even touching the ground. She was just being moved by the crowd. They got separated. And her parents just they look at these last pictures taken of her on her phone. And her dad said, "She's smiling. Look at her smile. Look at her face." And her mom would cry. She's my best friend. Just my best friend. Oh suck. and Kim and Mi look through photos on her phone trying to piece together how Chimn became one of the 158 victims of Soul's Halloween crowd crush. I can't look at the photos. They make me cry. That image of her keeps coming to me, so I can't sleep at night. It snowed yesterday and got cold. Chim is buried outside. It makes me more sad. A lot of parents gathered at a press conference and you can hear them scream at one point, take us and bring our kids back. Many of the parents are heard apologizing to their kids about what happened. And I can't even imagine the pain of the guilt that these parents are going to carry with the just for the rest of their lives. I I mean, I'm not saying that's a logical feeling. I'm not saying that they should feel guilty, but that's how parents feel. One father found out at the hospital that both his daughter's arms had been broken before she passed away. And now all he can do is visit her at her resting place and he tells her which means dad is here. Dad is here. He said I should have taken more care of her. She was a precious daughter to us. [music] Apostle there is said to have been over a ton one ton in weight of items left behind in the Taiwan tragedy. Just belongings mainly from the deceased. So, bags, clothes, just left in the alleyway cuz, you know, they were getting ripped off and the shoes were falling off. There were 123 handbags, 258 pieces of clothing, and 256 pairs of shoes. They were all laid out in a gym in Sor and parents and families were called to search the for their belongings of their loved ones. And there's this heartbreaking moment where a mother walks in and she recognizes her daughter's handbag. And like just to see her reaction to seeing her daughter's bag is so heartbreaking. Like I don't even have the words. [music] At a [music] press conference, another mom played a song that her son sent her. And at the end, he says in a voice memo, "Oma, happy birthday. I love you." And just seeing her break down as she listens to his voice again. By November 1st, the funeral homes in to were um overflowing. They were filled with bodies of young people who were just starting their lives. Like so many of them had just graduated high school. Some of them were just in college or they had just graduated. I mean, this is like the beginning of their lives and now they're gone. In one funeral home, 28-year-old James Sims body was put to rest. And in the room next door, his best friend Yun was put to rest. And in the funeral home across town, his girlfriend was put to rest. All three of them had died that night. And the one thing that James' parents kept saying was, you know, our son loved to work out. Like, he spent most of his free time in the gym. So, how could that not have even saved him? And I think that just shows you genuinely the true dangers of a crowd search. It doesn't matter your fitness level, your physique. It's just that dangerous. The parents cried. James is like the best older brother out there. How is our younger son ever going to cope? A bunch of James' friends who didn't attend it that night, they came to the funeral home and they all sat in silence grieving for James. And when they were done, they couldn't go home. They couldn't lay down and cry themselves to sleep. They had to go to the next room over and grieve for their other friend, Yun. There were altars set up all around South Korea for mourers to pay their respect. A lot of flowers were brought. Um, some with soju bottles were left for the victims. Many people bowed to the victims as a sign of ultimate respect. Fore! Foreign! Foreign! [snorts] the man who is breaking down talking about what good is a strong economy. I think there is a lot of trauma left over from the ferry incident in 2014 where over 300 people died, a majority of them young students. Uh we're going to get into that in a second, but I think the whole nation kind of united in these moments. Like the whole nation was so devastated by this. I mean, even here in the US, I didn't know a single Korean that did not feel immense sadness for what was going on. Many Koreans came out to hold up candles and these memorials all over South Korea. It's estimated that over a 100,000 people came out to grieve. But slowly that sadness and that grief would turn to anger because it's like okay now we want some answers. So the first person that not the families of the victims the internet went for were the so-called pushers. So there were words of survivors that sent chills down people's backs. A lot of survivors were interviewed and they said we were all suffocating and from behind we could hear people screaming push push push. The survivor said that the crowd started feeling these pushes in different intervals, like you were up against a massive wave, just being pushed, regaining balance, and then being pushed again. There's a couple of videos where you can see, I guess, waves in the crowd, if you can call it that. It just seems like people are standing static and then they're being pushed in these wavelike motions. But the unsettling part was the survivors saying that a group of people were pushing the crowds on purpose. More and more survivors came out to confirm these stories and they said yes, there were a group of guys screaming, "Push." And they were pushing hard. One survivor said that they heard a guy say, "Ah, let's just all push kids. Push, push, push." The survivor said they could see the crowd surge and they were all thrusting forward. And a bunch of people started collapsing in front of them. A lot of survivors all seconded this story and some even mentioned seeing a guy with a rapid headband being the leader of the pushers. They said that they heard him scream, "Go crazy kids, push." One survivor said about the rapid headband man, "I really felt like I was in hell. People in front of me were crying for help. They said that they were dying and couldn't breathe. People behind me were screaming and pushing. And I was like, wow, this is what hell feels like." My feet were lifted up from the ground. I couldn't breathe. Suddenly, someone grabbed me with their hand and I was crying. They had saved me. Like, they shouted at me to make myself pull myself together. There were still people around us screaming, partying, singing. It was so evil. It truly felt like hell. I saw people being crushed together and dying. If I ever see that person with the rabbid headband again, I would gladly stab them. Another witness said, "I can't believe what had happened. I saw people laughing. I'm not sure if they found it funny or if they were too scared to know what to do." What's wild is that during this entire tragedy, there were people that were still partying. Like I said, a survivor from India, New said that it felt like waves were coming down on him. There was nothing you could do. It felt like you were being sucked in the crowd. And it's like the crowd has a mind of its own. The only reason he said he survived was a woman, ironically, wearing angel wings waved um to him and he was able to find his way up to a high step in the alleyway and from there he could see people dying. He said there was so many of them. There was nothing he could do. He felt so helpless. He tried to scan the crowd for his friends. He reached for his phone. Nobody picked up. The most heartbreaking part was that he saw this man on the side of the road afterwards. Just tunnel vision performing CPR on his friend. Just going at it, not taking a moment to breathe for like 30 minutes. He had sweat dripping down. I mean, he himself was so out of breath. Like 30 minutes. People tried to drag him away because everyone knew that his friend was gone. But he still went on for 30 minutes. And Neville said it was evil because he turned to the right and he saw a few people fixing their faces while this was all happening as if nothing had happened. Another witness survivor said they lost faith in all humanity that day. Now back to the pushers. people in the back felt like they could push their way through the alleyway. And allegedly some of them screamed, "We need to push to get through." Some even said that the two Korean words um push and go back. So you had half the group wanting to go back and then you had half the group wanting to push. It was just at odds and above the loud music, the chaos of the screams. It was hard to hear what people were saying. So mid means push. Mid. And then tid means back. So, it's confusing. Yeah. So, with the music, maybe it was confusing. So, netzens took their jobs as internet sleuth seriously. They were able to find out who the rabbit headband guy was. They tracked him down online. They start leaving him comments, messages, telling him, "You better turn yourself into the police because you are the killer. You're the cause of this tragedy." It looked like they weren't going to stop until he was taken down. The rabbit headband man went on to Instagram to state that he and his friends were being hunted down and he said, "Yes, that's me in the rabbit hand headband in the pictures, but my friends and I had already left it station when the crowd surge happened." So, we were not the ones pushing. Like, maybe there's another guy with a rabbit headband, but it's not me. He posted his subway ticket to show proof and it showed that he did indeed leave Etoan station at 9:55 p.m. The police were also able to confirm that he was not in it at the time of the crowd search and he wasn't found responsible for the pushing. There were other rumors of a guy that went around pouring oil on the ground so that people would slip and fall. What? Those were later proven to be false. But the witch hunt didn't end there. I mean, I think people were just looking for someone to blame. A lot of angry netizens were looking for just anyone. Even journalists started to blame people. I think they were just looking for provocative stories. So they started blaming a very popular live streamer. Let's call him Kay. Netzens speculated that Kay was the reason for the crowd surge because he streamed that he was in it and all of his viewers swarmed to see him causing an influx of the traffic. So they were like, "It's his fault for telling so recklessly telling his viewers that he was in Itawan." And then he was like, "No, I happened to be in Itawan and I couldn't leave the bar because it was so dangerous." In the same breath, another celebrity was being blamed. Uin, he lives in Itawan and everyone speculated that he went out and people started spotting him outside and that's why they flocked to Itan. But in this case, Mr. Yu's agency came out to say that he wasn't even in South Korea at the time of the tragedy. So, it genuinely just seemed like people were going out to blame one individual. They were just trying to find someone. But that was proving to be very difficult. So briefly the public, the netzens, the journalists, they start blaming the businesses. They start turning their attention on the businesses. They said, "You guys didn't help out with the crowd surge. The businesses in the alleyway could have saved people, prevented the crowd surge." That's what they're saying. Now, a lot of this rumor comes from the fact that a bar, Wiki Bar, was seen closing their doors and not letting victims in. But one of the owners and the employees have come out and said basically in the beginning when the crowd search was just happening and people were running in. We didn't know what was going on. We thought they were drunk. We thought they were drunk and like having a blast and like screaming and like running into the So we closed the doors. I mean it was strange. But when we realized what was happening in the alleyway, we opened our doors. We let people in. We all started doing CPR. But it didn't matter because netzens were going crazy. They flooded the store owners with really nasty messages. Employees from the White Kiki Bar said, "I will never forget the look of the eyes of someone I perform CPR on." He also stated that there was a distinct smell that started coming from the crowd surge. And he'll never forget it. He said, "My heart beats so much that I have to take sedatives every day. No matter how much I drink, I can't fall asleep. I just keep thinking about the look in their eyes." The police even fueled this rumor that it was the business's fault by stating businesses specifically told the police to ease up on police presence this year because these businesses wanted people to party so that they could make more money. Which personally, what the business owners would later state, no, we didn't say that. And it even if we did, what are you saying? Like you're really just going to listen to us? Like when have you guys ever listened to business owners and we're like, you know what? You're right. Let me just not show up. And side note, the businesses in Itan, they're not doing well. Even months after the tragedy, a lot of them are drowning and dead. I mean, it has kind of become more of a ghost town these days. People said it just feels wrong to go there and have fun. And this is literally a city that was known for its like fun life, like bars, restaurants, shopping, these activities. They said they're all suffering. Some business owners said, you know, it's been rough. We were hit with CO and then when finally things opened up again, now no one comes to eat one. And not only that, but we had to live through that night trying to save people and being traumatized. So a lot of these business owners, these employees, they have a lot of trauma from the incident. They're emotionally, mentally scarred and add to that their financial pressures. A business owner said there's no sales, like none, not even one throughout the day. So it was clear that the businesses were not to blame. So since individuals in attendance the businesses they couldn't be blamed the internet started making it very political. Now this is very intense and like this when you start going into the whole itin story there's so many layers to it. I mean you think it's just first police planning the city planning isn't good and then it just gets very crazy. So October 29th earlier in the day there were these protests throughout uh a lot of it happening in Yongan which is the province that Ethawan is inside of inside of Zor. Now there were protests everywhere and they were like labor unions protesting. They were close to Ethawan. There were reports of 18 different rallies and protests taking place the day of October 29th and they were big. Like about 30,000 people were out protesting. Now, the right-wing individuals are trying to blame the left wing. So, the labor unions, they're typically associated with the left wing. And basically, they said because of these protests, police had to be dispersed throughout the province. And they used up all the manpower making sure that the protests were contained and nobody got hurt during the protest that they didn't have any more resources for the Halloween weekend. But the left-wing groups fought back for that reasoning and they said, "No, it's dumb to even draw these conclusions. So, on the weekends, nobody should protest." And the current president, President Yun, he's a conservative and we've talked about him before on the Stephanie Sue channel. He's made some very controversial moves such as moving out of the blue house, basically leaving the White House to live somewhere else. And that somewhere else is in Yongan, which is the province that it is in. And that's going to suck up a lot of resources, especially with the police department, because there was a set protocol in place when the president was in the blue house. And now they're adding just a lot more chaos. I guess it speculated that 700 police officers were busy commuting to and from the president's new residence. Basically, people on the left were saying because the conservative president unnecessarily moved, the Yongan police were too busy accommodating his new residence and keeping him safe. They didn't have enough manpower to protect the civilians in Itan that weekend. A lot of people were calling on him to step down, the president, but the conservatives were arguing with them and the whole thing just got super political. Now to be fair, Koreans had a lot of other things that they were mad at the government for. The most recent tragedy of the Seahor boat sinking in 2014. 306 people, majority of them students, died when a ferry sank off the southwest coast of the country. Government response was really bad. Like the president was shifting blame. It was just really gross. The government focused on their image rather than prioritizing lives. So, as the boat was sinking and in the key moments where lives could have been saved, the government straight up refused help from other countries because they would look bad on them. They tried to downplay the severity of the event. I mean, it was so gross. So, a lot of people with that trauma lingering in literally every Korean's minds, a lot of people are like, "Wait a minute, the government should be the one responsible. Everyone pays taxes in Korea. That's what the police are supposed to do." I mean, it's like that in the US. If there's a big concert in the area, if there's a big game, police have meetings about it. There's a protocol. There's a coordinated strategy. Like these these are the departments that are responsible for making sure that everyone is safe. Even if it's not like a police event like you have a big concert, police are going to be involved. And it's not just like this secretly planned event. Someone said, I mean, everyone knew what was going to happen in one. Like people were going to party. Someone said the government is responsible for such organized events. They should have planned ahead. They should have sent out enough police. They should have evacuated people accordingly. They should have controlled the crowds. I mean, even the signs were so clear. Like, even as the night progressed, you didn't have to be in Itan to know that it was getting overcrowded. Even the subway stations were jam-packed. Everyone was swarming to Itan station. And basically, they all would all travel to that tight alleyway to get to their destinations. The government response was just really bad. The Korean premier minister Hanukku was doing an international press conference about the incident and due to technical issues he couldn't hear the translator properly um like asking a question. So he smiles and he said who's responsible for me not hearing the interpreter is just really distasteful like his attitude his energy was very what are you doing? A lot of netizens wrote I can't believe what I just heard like is he being sarcastic right now? Like this is crazy. Is this the time or place to be cracking these cute little jokes? Like, how can you even smile and laugh in this situation? The next day, he apologized. But it gets worse. Do you remember the 16-year-old high schooler in the beginning of the episode who took his own life because he lost his friends in the deadly tragedy? Mhm. Well, the premier minister basically told the press that that victim should have been more committed to getting mental health treatment. He said the basic preventative measure that the government can take is is this. But the victims themselves need to want to receive treatment. They need to be persistent. Only then can the government support them. Yeah. Well, you can just see how that went over. And finally, with enough pressure, the South Korean government decided to list the high schooler as a victim of the Ethan tragedy. The government originally did not want to add the 16-year-old who committed um into the death toll. the government didn't know because it gets super technical, but the families of the victims could be able to receive some government assistant when it comes to mental health help and funeral costs. So, I think for the parents, they wanted him to be listed as a victim of the tragedy, not for the money, but because because he was. This is why he died. If that incident didn't have happened, he wouldn't have taken his life. It's pretty straightforward. So, yes, he is a victim of the Ethan tragedy, but you can see how the government had incentive to not have him listed. They didn't want to raise the death toll. They most likely didn't want to acknowledge the level of trauma that the incident would cause to the survivors, to everyone. So, after the government's response, the president also said his condolences, but it was just very, and again, this has nothing to do with like political parties or who the president is or what he stands for, but I just think in any situation like this, it's it's just a very lukewarm response. It was very PR. So, after the government response, parents of the victims, they weren't happy. One of them said, "This is a PR response. They should show us that they're working hard to prevent things like this from ever happening again. Like, we need to know what's being implemented so it doesn't take place." Another victim's mother was so angry she tore up the condolence wreaths that were gifted to her by the president and the mayor of Zor. She said, "The government failed to protect the children. Flowers are useless." Do you remember um Yzin? She dressed up as Princess Jasmine in the beginning of the story. Her dad visits her every day. She was his only child. She was his whole life. And he said in another interview, "Children who lose their parents are orphans." But there is no word for parents who lose their children. But I think I found one sinner. I feel so guilty for losing her. And he's mad. He's angry. He said the government is trying to give them money for funeral costs, which the funeral costs were said to have been about $11,000 a victim. and medical attention, medical help. I think $7,000 in medical help for the survivors. And he said, "We can live without the money. We can't live without our daughter. This is not the way to help us right now. This is not how you help the grieving parents and families. They're not taking accountability. They're just all shifting the blame to everybody else. And as a parent, it fuels me with rage." He said, "If we get a proper apology and see those responsible punished, it would reduce my anger maybe onetenth of a thousandth, but at least a little bit. [singing] I love you. All the families want is a government apology, an honest invest. stigation into how things happened. Many of the parents agree that this is murder. Murder by lack of organization, murder by omission. I mean, it just doesn't make any sense. Like, they anticipated many people were going to be there for Halloween. They had a meeting. The government had a meeting about how it was estimated that 100,000 people were going to gather in Ethawan and they didn't prepare for it. A parent shook their head and said, "I don't understand that. I don't get it. I just don't get it." Many of the parents were also saddened by the public reaction. One said, "Did the kids all go to heaven simply because they went out to have a good time?" I don't think that's right because a lot of people make it seem like these kids wanted to have fun, so they had to pay the price. But that's not what happened here. Another person weighed in. The government always talks about how they can't prevent an accident like this from happening, but now now they need to come up with practical measures to make sure it never happens again. The parents are angry and I think another good place for that anger is with the police and the police chief of the Yongan department because what the hell is going on with the police? It said that the police initially planned for 200 police officers to be at Etwan for Halloween, but that night only 137 officers were on duty in the area, which even 200 doesn't sound like a lot because the words Halloween and Itwan were trending on so many different social media platforms. YouTubers, streamers, they were all telling their viewers that they were going to be in Ewan. A lot of people were drawing attention to Itan's Halloween festivities. It wasn't like this, "Oh my god, I'm so shocked so many people showed up." There were so many phone calls made to the police alerting them of the dangerous situation unfolding. It said that from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. 28 reports were made about the overcrowding situation. From 8 to 10:00 p.m., 51 reports were made. And right before the accident, another 79 reports were made. And during all these reports that came before the incident, this is not even including during the incident when people were collapsing, only four police officers were actually dispatched to the scene. And I don't know if they did anything. Like maybe they told their superiors that something bad was happening and the superiors didn't care. I don't know. Maybe they didn't think anything was happening. And the first reports came in 4 hours before the actual tragedy. One survivor said, "It would have been nice if there were policemen trying to maintain order, but there was not a single police officer in the beginning that I saw. And once the accident happened, it was hard for them to enter the scene and help." So, after the tragedy, there was an investigation into the police. And an official said, "Oh, those reports coming in, they were just general reports about inconveniences that residents had." So, police chief of the Yonghan Police Department, EN, he was investigated and wow. Okay. So, the day of the incident when the reports of the dangerous conditions were coming in, the police chief decides that he's going to end up going back to the police station, but instead of walking there, which would have been a 10-minute walk, he decides he's going to drive to the police station. And it would take him nearly an hour to drive to the police station in critical moments because he didn't want to walk. Then when he gets to the station, he goes up onto the rooftop to check it out. He's thinking that maybe he can see the alleyway from the police station rooftop. But imagine people are in danger and you're like, "Let me walk up to the roof to see what's going on." Additionally, he tried to hide what his schedule was like the day of the incident, but reporters were able to piece it together. And also, side note, the president of South Korea called this man personally and he didn't pick up. So, let me walk you through that day that he really didn't want you to know about. He claimed he arrived at the scene at 10:17 p.m. and he took charge immediately in saving lives. But instead, what really happened was he was overseeing a rally, a protest that was happening near the president's office in Yongan. That ended around 8:30 p.m. He went to a local restaurant nearby for dinner with other officers at 9:24 p.m. He received the first really bad reports about the crowd situation. So other subordinates at the police station disregarded all the other prior phone calls. At 9:30 they were like, "Maybe we should tell the chief." Wow. So he gets to the restaurant 9:24. At 9:30 he gets it. What do you think he would do? He continues his dinner. He continues his dinner. He ate halong leisurely for about 20 minutes. He goes to his car at 9:47 p.m. and he drives to the police station to respond to this. Now this is what's insane. from that Tongang restaurant to the police station would taken him 10 minutes to walk. He chose to sit in traffic for an hour because he wanted to drive. He got to the police station at 10:55 p.m. It took him an hour to go half a mile. It could have been a 10-minute walk. And then he's seen on CCTV walking from his car to the police station. And if you see him walking, he has his hands behind his back as if he's leisurely strolling around while people are dying. Is he not behind bars? Oh, he is now. Yeah. Okay. So, uh, yeah, that's his urgency level. He gets to the police station, goes to the roof to check out the situation. Later, he tried to lie to Parliament and said that he requested additional safety task forces for Halloween, but he was rejected twice. He said he requested. They kept saying no. So he had to make do with the amount of officers that he had. This was a complete lie. He never requested extra security forces. Actually, a police officer for the Young Police Department reported that he told superiors that they need to look into crowd safety and deploy officers for Halloween weekend. But his superiors told him, and I quote, "Focus on the large-scale rally near the president's office that night instead." And just to expand on that, at the time,00 police officers were near the presidential office in Yongan. And the same day 4700 highly trained crowd control officers were near the president's office. They were tasked by the administration to monitor anti-government protesters. None of them were sent to Etwan. So it left only 137 officers for Ewan. And only 137 of them, that's literally nothing. No officers out of the 137, no officer was in charge of maintaining security and safety. Like there was no game plan. There was no thoughtout strategy. These 137 officers didn't even seem to be working in unison to make sure everyone stayed safe. In fact, these officers were told their main focus for the night should be on cracking down on drug usage in Ethan. Police Chief Im was arrested December 23rd of 2022, so not too long ago. He's still being investigated. Two other officers were immediately arrested because allegedly they told their subordinates to destroy internal reports about the phone calls that were being made to warn the police about the crowds. And as of January 13th of this year, there have been 23 people that were indicted. Half of them are police officers. Most of them are accused of contributing to the death toll through negligence or even trying to destroy official documents that might include criminal evidence. Out of that group, the highest ranking official so far is the chief of these whole metropolitan police. So EMJ is just the Yongen, the province, but the actual police chief was arrested as well. There's still a lot of questions though, like why wasn't the subway blocked? That's a huge point of contention. So normally the Korean government will block the subway stations and typically it's done through the police. The police will tell the metro department to skip a station during big events. So, Ethawan was becoming overly crowded. So, the first thing that they should do is make sure nobody stops at Itan anymore. It just bypasses it, right? You would think that's the next step. But the subway station wasn't blocked, which we know is super important because of the location of the Itwan station with the alleyway and how the tragedy unfolded. So, why wasn't it closed? There are two sides to this. the police's side and the transportation side, completely different government departments. The police said, "Oh yeah, we asked the Ethwan station to stop. Like we asked for this station to be skipped to help disperse the crowd when things started amping up. We even asked if the subways could give people free tickets out of Ewan. So really help them out, right? So we could control the crowds better." But our requests were denied twice. The metro department came out and is like, "No, that's not how it happened. That's not true at all. The police were only asking us, "How do we make requests for free stops for people, like free exits for people?" It was like a nonchalant question. So, we answered it with our usual response of like, "This is the official format on how to do it." They weren't even telling them like, "This is an emergency." The metro said that they can't control it on their own. Even if passengers were like, "You need to like skip this stop." They can't do it because it takes a lot of civilian guidance and movement. So, the police need to be at the station guiding people on what to do. Like, the train can't just be like, "Anyway, we're deciding to skip cuz then it's going to cause like a surge somewhere else." Like, it's a whole thing. Side note, another arrest was made. Um, the chief of the fire department was investigated. His name is Chong Boom. The police stated the police, okay, they stated that the chief of the fire department, Choi, did not respond properly to the scene, which is rich coming from them, but I guess there was maybe some valid criticism. So, the first ambulance at the scene was actually sent from a different province. So, they're like, "Explain yourself. That's what the police are saying." But nobody liked this take. Like, not the nizens. Like, really, nobody. So, Fire Chief Troy was there at the site. He was the control tower. He was guiding police officers, the firefighters. He was managing the chaos to the best of his ability. And I'm sure there is a lot of critique out there about maybe it wasn't the best managed, but he did seem to try. The police claimed that the incident was further escalated because the fire chief's poor management of the disaster. It just really seems like they were trying to point fingers if I'm being honest with you. Even the prosecutors, basically the DAs were like, "No, like let the fire chief go." And uh the firefighters came together to support him. They did not believe that this was the right decision. It felt like the government was using their chief as a scapegoat. M even most nizens and Korean citizens did not agree with this because I I do think that there is always a level of distrust with police but with the firefighters they were truly acting as first responders. It wasn't even in their plans like they weren't necessarily the most responsible for making sure that the crowd search didn't even happen in the first place. That falls on the police. So they came in afterwards to help. A lot of firefighters spoke up and said we gave our everything at the scene and it wasn't enough. But we gave it all. They said that they watched through the body cam footage to learn and to see what they could do better. And one firefighter said, "One thing I noticed is that there wasn't a single moment where any of my colleagues, not a single moment where we were walking, and I think that's supposed to call upon the chief of the police for his nonchalant attitude while the tragedy was taking place." And that's where we are. Like, it's crazy that there's no end right now. Like there's no okay guys and maybe we can all sleep better at night because this is what's being done. Like that's just where we are. It's so much more impactful to hear these personal stories because it just sounds like a crazy story, but to hear individually every person how this is impacting them is I don't know. It just brings so much realness into this. And I know a lot of people were focusing on the people partying and screaming on the beach and stuff, but just hearing how all these regular civilians, the way that they were trying to save each other, like [sighs] yeah, I think the one thing that we should try to remember is the new cycle moves so fast. And I just hope that the parents, the families, like they get the answers that they deserve. One quote from the parents really stands out to me, which is, "Please serve our kids justice on their way to heaven." And um there's a sign that was put up outside. This is a sign that was put up around everywhere. And it says, "Please don't forget about us about it." That is it for today's main episode. This wasn't even supposed to be like a video episode, but I just really wanted you guys to see and hear from the the families of the victims. But please stay safe and I will see you guys on Sunday for the min. Bye.