Despite anticipating a weekend crowd of more than 100,000, Seoul police had assigned 137 officers to the capital's nightlife district Itaewon on the day of the crush. Those officers were focused on monitoring narcotics use and violent crimes, which experts say left few resources for pedestrian safety.
The results of the 74-day police investigation announced by Son mostly confirmed what was already clear -- that police and public officials in Yongsan failed to employ meaningful crowd control measures for the expected numbers of Halloween revellers and essentially ignored pedestrian calls placed to police hotlines that warned of a swelling crowd hours before the surge turned deadly on Oct. 28.
Son said his team questioned nearly 540 people and collected 14,000 pieces of evidence from central and municipal government offices and transportation authorities. He said police investigators studied more than 180 video files recorded on security cameras or taken by journalists and pedestrians and jointly inspected the scene with forensic experts to analyze the density of the crowd.
Paramedics struggled to reach the scene because the area was so densely packed. Those who arrived were so overwhelmed by the large number of people lying motionless on the ground that they asked pedestrians to help them perform CPR. Most of the deaths were caused by suffocation or brain damage, police said.