Seoul Halloween stampede: Panicked emergency calls reveal crowd’s surge fears

The family of 23-year-old Australian Grace Rached have spoken about her death in the horrifying Halloween crowd surge in Seoul.

Remembering her as a “gorgeous angel” who “lit up a room with her infectious smile,” the family in statement said: “Grace always cared about others and she was loved by all.”

“Grace always made others feel important and her kindness left an impression on everyone she ever met.”

Rached was with her friends, including Nathan Taverniti, who took to TikTok to share how people filmed, sang and laughed “while his friends were dying”.

James Sim, 28, had organised to go to the Itaewon Halloween celebrations with his girlfriend and three other friends.

But by the end of the day, only two of the group of five friends returned alive. Sim and his girlfriend were not among them. They are two of the 156 people who died in the crowd crush on Saturday.

“He was always the organiser, as he loved nights out with his friends,” his mother tells BBC News. The family started to get worked up, when they found their son’s bed empty late at night.

As his father tried to reach him on the phone, the police answered, breaking the news that James, his girlfriend and their friend Yoon did not make it out alive.

He was getting serious in his relationship, and would have gotten married soon if they had survived, his father says.

“James was the best older brother,” he says, tearing. “How is my younger son going to cope without him?”

The narrow street in Seoul’s popular Itaewon neighbourhood was already packed with people celebrating Halloween as high school student Eunseo Kim and her friend pushed themselves into the crowd. Lines of people waiting for their faces to be painted or to get into restaurants slowed the flow of revellers walking through the party zone in South Korea’s capital.

As the 17-year-old slowly worked her way up the narrow alley on a hill, the crowd became increasingly compressed.

“Women were repeatedly saying ‘please don’t push,’ as men were saying ‘push, push,’” she recalled. She began struggling to breathe as her chest was crushed.

Then she lost her balance and fell.

On the ground, Kim felt like she had become invisible to the crowd. People stepped on her ankle, wrist and calf, and she remembers thinking she was going to die.

Incredibly, she survived, but at least 156 others were killed in the crush Saturday night, 101 of them women, primarily in their teens or 20s, according to figures released today by the Interior and Safety Ministry.

Choi Sukjae, an emergency medicine specialist and public relations director of the Korean Emergency Medical Association, says the fact that women are on average smaller than men can make them more vulnerable in crowd crush situations.

“Five to 10cm in height makes a big difference when it comes to chest pressure,” said Dr Sukjae.

At about 172cm (5’ 8”), Kim is taller than many other women in South Korea but still vividly recalls having the breath crushed out of her as people stuck their elbows out protectively and pushed into her chest.

“People were pressing me from both ways; my chest was compressed,” she said.

Seoul mayor Oh Se-hoon offered a tearful public apology today as the death toll rose to 156.

The mayor wept and briefly halted his news conference as he talked about the parent of a 20-year-old woman who was declared dead earlier in the day.

“When I tried to comfort a person with a daughter hospitalised at the National Medical Center yesterday, they said their daughter would survive and they believed so,” he said. “But I heard she passed away this morning. I am sorry that my apology has come late.”

In a bid to calm public outrage over the Halloween crowd crush, South Korea’s interior minister Lee Sang-min also apologised on Tuesday and vowed to find out the cause of the incident to prevent similar cases from recurring.

“As the minister overseeing the safety of the public, I express sincere apologies over the incident,” Mr Lee said, adding that the government had “limitless responsibility over the safety of our people” as he addressed a parliamentary session televised live.

He has come under sharp public criticism after saying that deploying more police would not have prevented the disaster.

Footage shared shortly before a deadly stampede in Seoul shows the scale of crowds that gathered in the area of Itaewon, where over 150 were killed.

Thousands of people can be seen in the narrow alley, as revellers gathered to celebrate Halloween and the crowd also spills out to the road, packing the pavement with even more bodies.

K-pop artists including BTS, Stray Kids and Aespa have announced postponements of planned public appearances following a stampede in Seoul that killed over 150 people.

Fan events, live streams, video premieres, streaming parties and photo reveals have also been cancelled following the incident.

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South Korea moved to calm public outrage on Tuesday over a Halloween party crush that killed more than 150 people, most of them young, promising a speedy and intensive inquiry and calling for tough new safety measures to prevent similar disasters.

The death toll from the crush at a crowded Halloween street party on Saturday climbed to 156 with 151 injured, 29 of whom were in serious condition. At least 26 citizens from 14 foreign countries were among the dead.

Tens of thousands of revellers - many in their teens and twenties and dressed in costume - had crowded into narrow streets and alleyways of the popular Itaewon district for the first virtually unrestricted Halloween festivities in three years.

Prime minister Han Duck-soo said the ongoing investigation would cover whether government agencies’ on-site responses were adequate. He pointed to inadequate institutional measures for crowd management as a cause of the deadly surge.

President Yoon Suk-yeol has declared a week of national mourning over the Halloween stampede, saying the country had too many safety disasters. He said better responses were critical, including improved crowd control.

“We should come up with concrete safety measures to manage crowds, not only on these streets where this massive disaster took place but at other places like stadiums and concert venues where large crowds gather,” he said at a cabinet meeting.

South Korean official admitted responsibility and apologised on Tuesday for failures in preventing and responding to a Halloween crowd surge that killed more than 150 people and left citizens shocked and angry.

National police chief Yoon Hee Keun said an initial investigation found there were many urgent calls from citizens notifying authorities about the potential danger of the crowd gathering in Itaewon. He said police officers who received the calls failed to handle them effectively.

“I feel a heavy responsibility (for the disaster) as the head of one of the related government offices,” he said in a televised news conference.

“Police will do their best to prevent a tragedy like this from happening again.”

Mr Yoon said police have launched an intense internal probe into the officers’ handling of the emergency calls and other issues, such as the on-the-spot response to the crowd surge in Itaewon that night.