“IT JUST FELL APART”
Washington stations about 27,000 US troops in South Korea to help protect it against the nuclear-armed North, and Taylor and his friends are based at Camp Casey in Gyeonggi.
On their week off, they decided to go to the festivities at Itaewon but said that when they found themselves in the huge crowd, they realised something was wrong.
“We were getting nervous too, we were in the middle of it and that’s why we got off to the side, and that’s when it just fell apart,” said Dane Beathard, 32.
People were crushed so tightly into the alleyway that emergency workers could not get them out of the packed crowd, he said.
“We helped pull people out all night … It was a long time for people stuck in there not to breathe,” Beathard said.
“All of the people crushed were in the front, where they collapsed into a pile,” he said, adding that at the worst points it was “a fifteen-foot layer of people”.
Authorities said the majority of victims were young women in their 20s.
“There were a lot of women in the crowd who got crushed,” said Jerome Augusta, 34.
“I think because they were smaller their diaphragms were crushed. And because they were panicking, which made it more chaotic,” he said.
Initially, there were barely any police or emergency responders at the scene, the trio said, and the scale of the crowd meant that the people at the back had no idea that disaster was unfurling right in front of them.
“We were screaming at them to back up, but it was too little too late,” Augusta said.
The soldiers stayed on the edge of the crush all night, desperately trying to pull people out of the piles of bodies, but said that by the time they got to them, it was often too late.
“We are not small guys but we were crushed too before we got out,” Taylor said, adding that the disaster had struck so quickly they had not managed to process what was going on.
“What you’ve got to understand is the people stuck in the front they were all on the ground – crushed. So you couldn’t push forward and trample everyone in front, so people piled up as they fell,” he said.
The trio said they felt lucky to have survived.
“When we left there were bodies everywhere, everywhere,” the three of them told AFP.