Surrounded by corpses strewing the narrow streets of Seoul, three American soldiers improvised rescuers to extract the survivors of the worst stampede that South Korea has ever known. But it was often “already too late”.
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People fell “like dominoes”, says, dazed, Jarmil Taylor, 40 years old.
With his two friends also stationed in Seoul, the soldier headed for the small alley on Saturday evening which turned into a bottleneck in the Itaewon district. They narrowly escaped the crush.
Interviewed by AFP, they look back on an evening marked by scenes of chaos, suffering and death, as they tried to help in this tragedy which killed 153 people.
“There weren’t enough people to help them all at once,” sighs Jarmil.
At the top of the alley, the crowd was trying to force their way through, even though the street was already packed – and people started falling “on top of each other”.
For those caught in the middle of the jostling, it was panic, screaming.
“They were panicking and that made the situation worse. There was noise everywhere…people screaming drowned out all the other sounds,” he says.
For the first time since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, some 100,000 people were out that evening for the Halloween festivities, an “unprecedented” crowd, according to local traders.
Faced with this movement of the crowd, the three soldiers mobilized to get the victims out of the crush, often unconscious, in order to transport them to a safe place and so that the relief workers could perform cardiac massage.
“The surrounding discos were full of people lying” on the ground, transformed into temporary shelters, describes Jarmil.
Too late
About 27,000 American soldiers are stationed in South Korea in the event of a nuclear attack from the North. Mr. Taylor and his colleagues serve in Gyeonggi, in Camp Casey.
They met in Itaewon to party during their week off. But they quickly realized that the crowd was too dense.
“We were tense too, we were in the middle,” recalls Dane Beathard, 32, for his part.
From the dense crowd, rescuers struggled to evacuate victims, he said.
“We helped extract people all night […]. People stuck in there couldn’t breathe for a long time,” says Dane.
The majority of the victims were young women in their twenties, authorities said.
Because of their “smaller size, I think their diaphragm was crushed, and as they panicked, it made [la situation] even more chaotic”, explains Jerome Augusta, 34 years old.
Initially, there were hardly any police or rescue teams on the scene, the trio noted, and the crowd kept growing.
The people in the back couldn’t see what was happening just ahead.
“We were shouting at them to back off, but it was already too late,” says the soldier, who says he worked tirelessly all night to save lives.
Even when they did manage to extract victims, they were often lifeless.
“We are not little guys, but we too were crushed before leaving” the crowd, remembers Jarmil.
“What you have to understand is that the people stuck in the front were all on the ground, already crushed,” he explains.
The three compatriots consider themselves lucky to have survived this tragedy.
“When we left, there were bodies everywhere, everywhere,” let go of the three men together.