The shortcut is buttressed by bars blaring hip-hop on one side and the towering wall of the Hamilton Hotel on the other.
“The clubs near where it was happening ... myself,as well as others,were begging,pleading,that they have to let people go inside of their venues to relieve the pressure on the streets,” said one of Rached and Cho’s friends,Australian fashion designer Nathan Taverniti.
“They turned to me and[crossed their arms],they could not let people inside.”
Across the lane,extensions by the Hamilton Hotel appeared to have narrowed the alleyway to only 3.2 metres at critical points.
Dr Milad Haghani,an expert in crowd management at the University of NSW,said that had created a bottleneck.
“It’s like a road that has heavy traffic. It’s moving in four lanes,and all of a sudden,one of the lanes is gone,” he said. “This is a very simple red flag that would have come up in risk assessment had it been done properly.”
No risk assessment had been done. Itaewon,like Hongdae to the west in central Seoul,is a hive of activity on any normal Friday and Saturday night,let alone Halloween,an American tradition that like fried chicken,pizza and baseball has been taken up with gusto by Korea and transformed into its own phenomenon.
There are no central organisers,just hundreds of bars and,usually,a night that allows young people to cut loose from the long hours of Korea’s corporate and study culture. Revellers spill out onto the street after picking up beers,soju and cigarettes from the 7-Elevens that line each thoroughfare,amateur K-pop groups fill squares hoping to get noticed,while university students pile into photo booths and karaoke joints until sunrise.
But on Saturday,after three years of masks,COVID apps and social isolation,the demand was greater than anyone in a position of authority had planned for. And when that demand overwhelmed them,they failed to react.The handful of police on hand to respond could do little,but yell as the bodies piled up.
“People are dying,” Itaewon police sergeant Kim Baek-gyeom yelled as the crowd surged past him. “Help,please.”
Lee Sang-min,the minister for the interior,said he was sorry. Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon,apologised. President Yoon Suk-yeol said he was enraged. On Wednesday,national police raided the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency and the Yongsan police station searching for documents that could point to official ineptitude.
The Korean opposition,the Democratic Party,has called for the police chief and the interior minister to be sacked.
“This comes down to only one thing -- clear government negligence,” said Taverniti.
Haghani said the tragedy was “very easy to prevent”.
“Bad design,lack of planning and lack of monitoring. That’s a combination that you really want to avoid,” he said.
“If there was an external threat,if there was an active shooter,if there was a fire,then it would have been a more complex scenario and less avoidable,but this kind of scenario,in the absence of any external threats,it was absolutely avoidable.
“That’s why I was a bit riled up about it.”
Haghani said even if authorities skipped pre-event planning – such as road closures,extra police,traffic management and density estimation – they could have been able to adapt with real-time intervention.
His colleagues worked with the Vivid Festival in Sydney and with events in Melbourne this year to manage crowds that were expected to be larger than usual after years of COVID restrictions.
“Based on real-time CCTV footage data,they can have an estimate of the density of the crowd,they can have an estimate of the floor size of the crowd,and they can estimate the mood of the crowd,” he said.
“Those three things together can give them warnings,and they can make recommendations in real time to authorities.”
Young Koreans are angry too. Robbed of years in the pandemic,the disaster is another blow to a generation that felt like it had earned a good time after sacrificing many of their freedoms for so long.
“I feel devastated and depressed,” said Kim Do-young,26,a hip-hop musician living in Gwangju,about 320 kilometres south of Seoul. “I couldn’t work on my music. I am angry at those blaming victims that simply wanted to enjoy a weekend after several years of COVID restrictions.”
In Hongdae,18-year-old Park Jue-hui did not personally know any of those who died. “But they were all in my age group,studying their butt off to prepare for the future,” she said. “It’s just mind-boggling.” Her boyfriend Yoo Jae-won said he was still struggling to process what happened.
“I still don’t think what happened is real life,I can’t just distinguish it from reality. ”
Nearby,student Kim Seo-jeong had tears welling in her eyes as she thought of Rached.
“They were in their teens and 20s,one of them was a film producer. They ended their lives so unexpectedly without getting a fair chance to really unfold their dreams.”
Rached,the Cho sisters and Taverniti had their own dreams when they stepped out for a night out in Seoul. Taverniti was decked out as the Japanese anime character Kaneki,Rached as Audrey Hepburn fromBreakfast at Tiffany’s,Julia as a cat and Justina as a witch.
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“This was how our night was supposed to be,” Taverniti told his TikTok followers.
“Fun happy and free. It ended with two of my friends in the hospital. And one passed away. I am sad,I am angered,I am at a loss.”
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