People walk through an alley in Itaewon where the Halloween crowd crush occurred last year, in Seoul, South Korea, on Oct. 23, 2023.
He had first heard about crowd trouble in Seoul’s nightlife district of Itaewon on evening news bulletins, but it was a call from his wife that made panic set in. Their 21-year-old daughter, Yujin, had set off to celebrate Halloween in Itaewon last Oct. 29 with a friend, who had phoned to tearfully explain that as the melee grew denser she had lost grip of Yujin’s hand and consciousness soon after.
Left: Yujin Choi, alongside her parents, on her graduation day at NLCS Jeju in June 2019. Right: Yujin in France in July 2019. “We all love her smile. But we all didn’t know that this photo will be used her memorial alter photo,” says her father Young-Joo Choi.Choi was eventually reunited with Yujin in the morgue of a different hospital across the city. He spent the night weeping and stroking her hair.
It was the first virtually unrestricted Halloween festivities since the pandemic, yet only 137 police officers were on duty in the area—compared with 6,500 assigned to monitor a peaceful protest of around 25,000 people against the government of President Yoon Suk-yeol the same night. Just after 10 p.m., the crowds in Itaewon surged in different directions with people losing their footing on the ally’s incline, causing a domino effect and many to be trampled.
The furor fed a heightened climate of revenge politics, where any misstep by a rival party is seen as something to jump on, making officials more wary of taking responsibility, says O’Malley. “People were really upset that the opposition party had played politics with this tragedy.”
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