Surrounded by corpses in the narrow streets of Seoul, three American soldiers set out on an advanced rescue mission to retrieve survivors of the worst stampede South Korea has ever known. But it was often “already too late”.
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People fell “like dominoes,” said Jarmile Taylor, 40, in a daze.
Along with two of his friends in Seoul, the soldier went to the small alley on Saturday evening, which turned out to be a bottleneck in the Itaewon district. They got out of trouble in no time.
In an interview with AFP, they look back on an evening marked by scenes of chaos, suffering and death as they tried to help in the tragedy that killed 153 people.
“There aren’t enough people to help them at once,” Jarmil sighs.
At the top of the alley, though the street was already full, the crowd tried to force their way through—and people began to fall “one upon another.”
For those caught in the middle of the commotion, panic, screams.
“They panicked and that made the situation worse. Noise everywhere.
For the first time since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, around 100,000 people came out that evening for Halloween festivities, an “unprecedented” crowd, according to local traders.
Faced with this movement of the crowd, the three soldiers rallied to rescue the crushed, often unconscious victims, to carry them to safety, and rescue workers to perform CPR.
“The surrounding discos where people were lying on the floor” were turned into makeshift shelters, Jarmil describes.
Too late
About 27,000 US troops are stationed in South Korea in case of a nuclear attack from North Korea. Mr. Taylor and his colleagues serve at Keongi in KC.
They met in Itaewon for a party during their weekend. But they soon realized that the crowd was too thick.
“We were nervous too, we were in the middle,” recalls Dane Beathardt, 32, for his part.
Rescue workers struggled to evacuate victims from the dense crowd, he said.
“We spent the whole night helping to extract people […]. Those trapped there could not breathe for long,” says Dane.
Most of the victims were young women in their twenties, officials said.
Because of their “small size, I think their diaphragms were crushed, and because they panicked, it happened. [la situation] It’s still confusing,” explains 34-year-old Jerome Augusta.
Initially, the trio noted that there were no police or rescue teams at the scene, and the crowd continued to grow.
The people behind could not see what was going on behind them.
“We shouted at them to retreat, but it was already too late,” says the soldier, who says he worked tirelessly through the night to save lives.
Although they were able to extract their victims, they were mostly lifeless.
“We were not small, but we were also crushed before leaving,” the crowd recalled.
“What you have to understand is that the people who were stuck in the front were all on the ground, already crushed,” he explains.
The three guys consider themselves lucky to have survived this tragedy.
“When we went, there were bodies everywhere, everywhere,” let alone the three of them together.
