The bodies of several lifeless people were sprawled on the ground in the Itaewon neighborhood on Saturday night, their shirts pulled over their faces after rescuers checked for acute injuries, videos reviewed exclusively by The Washington Post showed.
One man had a red soccer jersey pulled over his face as he was treated with a defibrillator. A woman’s body was covered, with blood on the ground next to her. Several lay in the street with their mouths open, appearing to be dead.Joshua and Angela Smith, siblings from Florida who booked a room at the Hamilton Hotel in Itaewon to experience a Korean Halloween, watched the disaster unfold in the alley from a ninth-floor window.
“Once we saw them doing that, that’s when the music, the lights, finally got shut down,” Joshua said. “That’s when it turned dark.” “It was almost post-apocalyptic. It was almost all civilians, no medical personnel, trying to save these people,” said her friend, 24-year-old tech worker Yoon-sung Park. He had helped carry injured people to safer ground, where they could receive CPR.
The Halloween crush in Seoul's Itaewon district killed over 150 people and injured dozens. South Korea declared a period of national mourning on Oct. 30.