One Itaewon Halloween Survivor Remembers

Just across the street from Halla Classic is Harrington Tower. Its basement is given over to a series of restaurants, one of which is Oh Han Soo Beef Noodles. I have had lunch there many a time. But I noticed that its manager, 29-year-old Han Gi-hyeok (English name of Bernard), was missing in November and December. When I finally saw him, I asked where he had been. It turns out that Bernard had gone through a rather traumatic experience; he was among the 100,000 or so Halloween revelers who had filled the streets and alleys of Itaewon on the night of October 29, 2022.

Bernard informs me that he has attended every Halloween gathering in Itaewon for the last decade, other than the COVID-19 years of 2020 and 2021. On that fateful night, he was with his girlfriend, Shin Hye-yun, his friend, Kwon Yong-jin, and two others at a bar on the south side of Itaewon Street. After downing their last bottle of soju, he and Yong-jin left to join the crowd. His costume, if it may be so called, was a snazzy gray suit, white shirt and red tie. His hair was dyed a blondish pink, and he had placed a temporary tattoo under his right eye and one on his neck.

Unaware that the first of many emergency calls had been made nearly four hours earlier, they crossed Itaewon Street around 10:30 p.m., reached an alley known as Itaewon-ro 27 and turned east. It was, I do not need to tell you, packed. Young and full of bravado, these guys did not worry and plunged in.

“I never thought there would be so many people,” he said. “Yong-jin and I couldn’t go anywhere. We were stuck. But still, everybody was laughing and having fun at that point. After a while, we started to realize it was serious.”

As they slowly edged eastward along that alley, an equally large group was going west, coming right at them. This is a most unfortunate matter, since the two groups merged and had no choice but to turn south into a downward-sloping alley just west of the Hamilton Hotel. Less than 50 meters long and 3.2 meters wide, it was the scene of death.

“People were screaming and crying and begging for help,” Bernard recalled. “I noticed that some of those around me, especially small women, were starting to faint. I could barely breathe. Hye-yun was calling me to find out how I was, but I could not put my hand into my pocket to reach my phone. I was just trying to hold on and keep breathing. I saw that some people had fallen at the bottom of the alley, like dominoes, making it impossible to escape. But the police, firefighters and paramedics eventually started to make progress. They were pulling people out of the crowd, one by one. Finally, one of them got me out. I tried to go back to find Yong-jin, but the police would not allow me to. After 5 or 10 minutes, we found each other, hugged and cried. Eventually, Hye-yun found me. I was totally dirty and had lost both of my shoes. The three of us had to walk for an hour, all the way to the Banpo Bridge, before we could find a taxi to go home.”

Bruised but otherwise unhurt, he did not require hospitalization. Still, he found it necessary to attend a psychiatric clinic for four weeks to process the unnerving incident—the South Korean government is at pains not to call it a “disaster”—in which 158 people died (not including three who later committed suicide) and 196 were injured. Although Itaewon is Seoul’s number-one multi-culti area, most of the victims were Koreans in their 20s and 30s. Two-thirds of the people who suffered compressive asphyxiation were female.

My friend says that he has tried to ignore the media reports of what happened that night, as he focuses on his own emotional well-being. Nevertheless, he is dismayed at how some politicians have tried to frame it a certain way; the firefighters union has sued the Interior Ministry, 23 police officers have been charged with involuntary manslaughter and negligence, and a special committee has been launched in the National Assembly to ascertain what went wrong. When I asked him and Hye-yun whether the police deserved some blame, they refused to say so. But the fact is, only a skeleton crew of 137 cops were on hand before a pleasant evening turned calamitous. This was later excused by the assertion that Halloween at Itaewon does not constitute an “official event.” (By contrast, about 1,300 police had been assigned to a BTS concert a few weeks earlier.) Some 6,500 had been deployed on October 29 to manage political demonstrations, none of which are “official events.” That included protecting president Yoon Suk-yeol in his personal residence in Yongsan since he had chosen to abandon the Blue House after his election.

Internal police documents showed that warnings had been issued about the possibility of deaths from imminent crowding well before October 29. I hate to engage in finger-pointing, but there can be little doubt that the Itaewon Halloween tragedy could have been prevented or at least ameliorated. The cops, few though they were, could have and should have determined as early as 5 o’clock that all foot traffic had to go in a clockwise or counterclockwise direction. Allowing the two groups to meet and converge into that narrow north-south alley was a monumental blunder.